This project examines the influence of National institutional frameworks on firm innovation strategies, focusing especially on the relationship between financial systems and patterns of innovation in knowledge-intensive industries. Of particular interest is the role of the domestic venture capital industry and the establishment of a high-tech stock market (the Neuer Markt) in 1997 in stimulating high-tech in Germany. The project involves two focused cross-national comparisons. The first one compares software companies initially listed on Germany's Neuer Markt with companies in the same industry listed on Britain's Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and the Techmark segment of the London Stock Exchange. The second compares the characteristics of high-tech company IPOs (Initial Public Offerings, or first listings of companies on the stock market) on Germany's Neuer Markt and the US Nasdaq. The working hypothesis is that Germany’s knowledge-intensive companies pursue different types of innovation strategies, rely on different types of finance, and have different kinds of governance structures than companies based in the US and UK. The project is in part funded by the European Commission under the joint research program “Economic Change; Micro-Foundations of Organizational and Institutional Change in Europe.”

This project examines the effects of institutional structures and ideological partisanship in the shaping of budgetary and fiscal policy in the OECD countries. Particular emphasis is given to the member states of the European Monetary Union. The project builds on research illuminating the role of partisanship in shaping public finance policies within the context of increasing international interdependence. The project explores how governmental legislative and executive institutions as well as the degree of fiscal decentralization, along with the economic institutional environment in which these political institutions are embedded, affect the policy-making process and its outcomes.

Of special interest are the shape of the taxation regime and the emphases given to social and other forms of spending.  In addition, the project pays particular attention to the ways in which different redistributive strategies and institutional settings shape the evolution of income inequality in the OECD countries.