The Working Paper series publishes original research related to IREF’s mission.
Every article also provides a non-technical Executive Summary.
WP 2025-12. Executive Summary This paper examines Gottfried Haberler’s early theoretical work on index numbers as a unique point of convergence between the Austrian School of Economics and the tradition…
WP 2025-10. Executive Summary Many countries’ Founding Fathers and large portions of academia believed that constitutions, common-sense economics, and people’s vigilance would be enough to restrain taxation and public debt.…
WP 2025-05. Executive Summary The temptation to rely on findings from behavioral economics to condition human behavior has given rise to libertarian paternalism, an approach to public policy design that…
WP 2024-11. Executive Summary Our study uses a qualitative comparative analysis method in order to assess the impact of national accreditation schemes and also other relevant features of the higher…
WP 2024-10. Executive Summary When comparing inflation across European countries, we often overlook a simple fact – inflation is the percentage change in the price level. The rate of inflation…
WP 2024-04. Executive Summary Intuitively, crime and entrepreneurship are radically opposed in desirability and empirical effects. Yet, recent research has deliberately chosen to go beyond certain obvious facts, creating —…
WP 2024-03. Executive Summary This paper reviews the neglected contributions to the theory of index numbers in Gottfried Haberler’s (1927) habilitation thesis Der Sinn der Indexzahlen (The Meaning of Index…
WP 2023-05. Executive Summary This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of car scrappage schemes implemented in the European Union (EU) during the economic crisis of 2009. The study uses…
WP 2023-04. Executive Summary Among libertarians, it has been conventional to define the minimal state as a state that enforces contracts and employs coercion to prevent force and fraud only.…
WP 2023-02. Executive Summary We designed a Survey Experiment (SE) to study the attitudes of the Italians towards wealth, income and consumptions taxes. In particular, we interviewed a sample of…
