This article discusses legal, economic and political aspects of the German compulsory military service. We argue that Germany should introduce a professional army because it is more efficient and less prone to cause problems with vertical and horizontal tax equity. In addition most of the...

We compare large inter vivos transfers to bequests using retrospectively surveyed event history data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP). We find the chances of receiving gifts and bequests to depend strongly on the socio-economic position of the parents and on the number of...