The Curious Attraction of Wagner's Law

Alan Peacock and Alex Scott

Public Choice, 2000, vol. 102, issue 1-2, 17 pages

Abstract: Wagner's "law of increasing state activity" has recently been subjected to intensive use of recondite econometric testing procedures. An examination of the relevant articles reveals ignorance both of Wagner's definition of "state activity" and of his insistence that he was not engaged in prediction. Consequently, the omission of public enterprises contained in Wagner's definition leads to a model misspecification and the object of testing his hypothesis remains obscure. Copyright 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (71)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:102:y:2000:i:1-2:p:1-17

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().