We treat fiscal equalisation as an insurance device against regional tax revenue variance. This insurance comes at the price of a moral hazard: regional government will spend too little effort on the development of the local tax base. In a simple bargaining model with two identical regions we...

If there is a means tested basic income for old age, households will tend to reduce precautionary savings to an inefficiently low level. This might serve as a justification for a public pension system. In a representative agent framework, indeed, the introduction of a compulsory pension s ystem...

We distinguish two ways in which national public pension systems can distort intra-EU movements of workers. First, each national pension system may display an inherent mobility bias. We propose the 'Lodge Test' to identify any such bias and show that many national pension systems in the EU are...

The labor-leisure distortion of a pay-as-you-go pension system can be reduced through a stronger tax-benefit link or Bismarck pension system. Distortions of the fertility decision can be reduced through the introduction of a stronger child-benefit or child pension system. Within our optimal...

Kinderlosigkeit hat zwei unmittelbare Auswirkungen auf das Rentensystem. Erstens stehen dadurch in der nächsten Generation weniger Beitragszahler zur Verfügung. Zweitens zahlen Kinderlose ihrerseits typischerweise mehr Rentenbeiträge. Denn insbesondere Frauen ohne Kinder haben ein meist...

Our study compares the efficiency of unemployment insurance programs in a state union. A centralized insurance will pool the cost of unemployment; this results in a collective bargaining in the member states, which leads to excessively high wages and inefficient insurance. Those high wages...

In the last years, there has been a shift toward more private financing of higher education in many countries. At the same time, student mobility has substantially increased. This paper analyzes in a two-region model the impact of student mobility on region-specific higher education quality with...

The paper deals with the question of whether fiscal transfers re-ceived by cities can be justified by a higher cost of producing publicly provided goods. In the model, increasing the population density implies both a higher output per capita due to agglomeration economies and a higher cost of...

This paper investigates the inter-temporal structure of implicit taxes that arise in unfunded pension schemes. We demonstrate that these tax rates are declining over the life cycle. Using German micro-data for men and married women we estimate periodic wage elasticities of labour supply in order...

In the literature, several approaches have been taken to measure the impact of demographic ageing on public pension schemes, with particular attention being paid to potential fiscal imbalances across the generations involved in demographic transition. In this paper, we review three of these...