In this paper I survey and reinterpret the extensive literature on Europe’s Great Depression. I argue that Europe could not exploit its vast economic potential after 1918, because the war had not yet come to an end—indeed, it did not end before 1945. Both domestic and international institutions suffered from a lack of reciprocal trust and commitment, which can be clearly illustrated in the real...

Prof. Fritz W. Scharpf is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne Abstract The paper represents a preliminary and partial analysis of the information collected in a comparative 12-country study of the adjustment of national employment and social-welfare policies to the increasing internationalization of product and capital markets. After the postwar decades, whe...

We study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an economy with intergenerational transmission of wealth and redistributive …scal policy. We characterize the transitional dynamics of the distribution of wealth as well as its stationary state. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution.We We gratefully acknowledge conversations with Marco Bassetto, Alberto Br...

The social performance of fiscal redistributive mechanisms in Canada continues to receive a growing interest from politicians and research scientists. The aim of this paper is to assess the evolution of social classes in Canada and to check whether the market and governmental redistribution factors have affected their evolution during the last decade. We focus on the dynamic of inequality, pola...

This paper examines logic and evidence bearing on the efficacy of fiscal policy in severely depressed economies. In normal times central banks offset the effects of fiscal policy. This keeps the policy-relevant multiplier near zero. It leaves no space for expansionary fiscal policy as a stabilization policy tool. But when interest rates are constrained by the zero nominal lower bound, discretio...

Policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking to mayors as policy innovators capable of addressing critical challenges, including income inequality. A robust scholarly debate contests whether mayors are (1) limited by economic constraints and unable to prioritize redistributive initiatives, or (2) spurred to pursue equity-oriented policies according to partisan and ideological preferences....

Inequalities in health between rich and poor areas of Britain widened in the 1980s and 1990s, and the current government has repeatedly expressed its intention to reduce these inequalities. In this article, however, the authors report that inequalities in life expectancy have continued to widen, alongside widening inequalities in income and wealth, and argue that more potent and redistributive ...