Taking up the challenge!

This commemorative publication was given to Jürgen Backhaus (JB) on July 10, 2015 marking the day of his final lecture in the Department of the Sciences of the State at Erfurt University. Since 2001, he has been a full professor at our university for Public Finance and Fiscal Sociological (Alfred Krupp von Bohlen- und Halbach-Foundation). After a stroke in September 2014, he was forced to retire ahead of time. Therefore, the set-up time for publishing this Festschrift was rather limited. The considerable amount of contributed articles bespeaks his appreciation and popularity among his colleagues and peers. The contributions in this volume strikingly show the main points of JB's teaching and research activities. Some have a focus on the history of economic ideas (Baloglou, Brady, Chaloupek, Frambach, Hagemann, Montgomery, Reinert). Others deal with topics of finance and fiscal sociology (Costarella and Fedeli, Nentjes, Raudla, Schöbl, Tiedeman and Plassmann, Wagner), partly with up-to-date references (Bassen, Dietz, Ebner, Economou and Kyriazis, Forte and Mutascu, and Godert-van der Kroon). Two articles are concerned with the current university educational system (Schmidt, Drechsler), which JB foresightedly was very skeptical about. Two articles are aligned in a more econometrical and experimental way, namely the article by Michele, Francesco and Michela, and the one by Rötheli, a colleague from the Erfurt Department of the Sciences of the State.