There is a tendency in the new institutionalist literature to equate institutional inertia with stasis and no-change. Using case studies from the international telecommunications regime and the German health care system, the paper tries to show that this equation is wrong. Inertia does not...

Is corporate tax competition a threat to democracy in the EU? The answer depends crucially on a positive analysis of the effects of tax competition on national policy autonomy. Most analyses focus on direct effects on corporate tax rates and revenues. We contend that this focus is too narrow. It...

Hat Kommunikation einen positiven Einfluß auf Kooperation? In der Debatte, die die deutsche Theorie internationaler Beziehungen in den letzten Jahren um die Rationalität von Kommunikation geführt hat, wird diese Frage emphatisch bejaht. Es besteht Konsens, daß internationale Verhandlungen...

Tax competition poses two problems for international cooperation: defection and distributive conflict. Multilateral cooperation to stop tax competition may fail because states face incentives to renege on their promises or because they face adverse distributional consequences, either of which...

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? The conventional wisdom believes so: open borders invite tax competition, which in turn erodes the revenues from capital taxation. However, there is little evidence to support this view. The data show that revenues from capital...

Recent research has shown that regulatory competition does not necessarily lead to downward pressures on regulation, but may at times also push the level of regulation upwards. Extending David Vogel's California effect argument, this paper shows that such upward pressure may not only result...

Das Vorhaben, über das hier zu berichten ist, geht auf eine Anregung des Max-Planck-Instituts für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG) im Frühjahr 2003 zurück, die von der VolkswagenStiftung aufgegriffen und als Projekt finanziell gefördert wurde. Ausgangspunkt war die Beobachtung, dass in den...

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? The conventional wisdom believes so: open borders cause tax competition, which in turn leads to a race to the bottom in capital taxation. However, the data show that revenues from capital taxation are fairly stable in OECD...

In der Politikwissenschaft gibt es drei verschiedene Thesen zum Zusammenhang von Globalisierung und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Die erste behauptet, die Globalisierung sei schuld an der chronischen Krise des Wohlfahrtsstaates. Der Prozess der außenwirtschaftlichen Öffnung und internationalen Integration...