Publications - MPIfG

political processes through which these directives were transformed into national
law and, second, on the institutional structures and processes through which these
directives are implemented, and their implementation is monitored. Finally, the
projects are also examining the difficult question of whether and to what extent
these directives are actually changing existing practices in all of the member states.
In answering these questions, Miriam Hartlapp, Simone Leiber and Oliver Treib
jointly collected literature, quantitative data and interview data on the basis of a
common research design in all member states. Moreover, while their individual
dissertations have focused on specific issues that were selected for an in-depth
examination on the basis of theoretical criteria, all three authors are now collaborating
with Gerda Falkner on a synthetic study that will present the findings of the
overall project from a comparative perspective. Oliver Treib’s dissertation was successfully
completed in 2002, whereas the other two and the synthetic volume are
expected to come to completion in 2003. In the same period, Gerda Falkner also
completed her work on decision processes within the European Union, with a specific
focus on the processes of Treaty revision through Intergovernmental Conferences.
A third group included projects by senior researchers that were more loosely coordinated,
but still directly related to the overall theme of the cluster.
The habilitation project of Susanne Lütz had as its core a comparative study of
recent changes in the national regimes regulating the operation of banks and securities
markets in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. It combined
a theoretical analysis of the problems to which regulation is supposed to
respond with a historical analysis of the evolution of different national regulatory
regimes, and it confronted both with recent changes in the economics and the
technology of internationalized capital markets in order to define the specific
challenges that regulatory reforms needed to address. The project was completed
in 2001 and has led, in the meantime, to a successful habilitation and a monograph
published by Campus.
In another habilitation project, Philipp Genschel explained the limited success
and predominant failure of efforts at tax harmonization in the European Union.
Analyzing the problems and options of international tax harmonization within a
longer historical perspective, the project is able to show that the dominant concern
of harmonization efforts in the EC and the EU was to remove double taxation
and other obstacles to the free movement of goods, services and capital.
While double taxation was in fact eliminated, further Commission initiatives were
blocked by national governments defending their fiscal autonomy. In the field of
capital taxes, this half-way solution implies opportunities for international tax
avoidance and tax evasion, and hence incentives for international tax competition,
that are considered a major problem in most member states. Again, the project
and the habilitation were successfully completed, the book was published by
Campus, and Philipp Genschel was appointed to a professorship at the International
University Bremen.
Project Areas and Research Projects
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