In this overview we give a short survey of the way in which the theory of the firm has been formulated within the `mainstream' of economics, both `past' and `present'. One aim is to give an outline of the historical developments that led to the contemporary theories. As to a breakpoint between...

Paul A. Samuelson taught that every society has to choose between butter and guns. Individuals have to make the Gossen test of utility equivalence. The authors of the recent Mirrlees Review seem to believe that they can avoid this choice by considering taxation only. But how can one decide on...

This paper discusses the role that the economics of uncertainty has played in the theory of public finance. From being mostly concerned with its choice-theoretic foundations in the 1950s and ‘60s, the theory of expected utility maximization and risk averse behaviour has contributed decisively...

This essay is written for a Festschrift to commemorate Jürgen Backhaus's contributions to political economy on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Erfurt. Jürgen is a penetrating and wide-ranging scholar from whom I have learned much since we first met in 1974. It would be...

In spite of the efforts made over the past several decades to bring to the fore the important contributions of the Italian public finance tradition - La Scienza delle finanze - this body of analysis remains relatively unknown outside of Italy. The same cannot be said of the seminal work of Knut...

This paper is a slightly revised version of a presentation that was given at the celebration of the Center for Finan-cial Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt on the occa-sion of the 80th birthday of Dr. Rolf-E. Breuer on Novem-ber 30, 2017. It illuminates the development of the ex-change...