The ecological tax reform that Germany implemented between 1999 and 2003 increased energy tax rates-especially on gasoline and diesel. Today, the ecological tax hikes yield an annual revenue of around 20 billion euros or 0.6 percent of GDP. The money is used to finance a higher federal grant to...

Getting tax and transfer systems to efficiently deliver sufficient revenues to achieve macroeconomic targets, address goals in re-distribution and social welfare, encourage employment, accommodate business-competitiveness concerns and incorporate environmental issues is difficult. In Australia,...

We study the demand for retirement products given access to innovative plans which depend on the realized survival probabilities, like tontines, in addition to traditional annuities. Preferences of agents are modeled by a generalized life-cycle utility function allowing for temporal risk...

The Hungarian Personal Income Tax system is being transformed between 209 and 2013. Tax brackets and the previously existing tax credit is being abolished and this changes the net/gross income ratios in all income categories. This does not only lead to a significant loss in government's income,...

This paper studies a problem of non linear taxation when individuals have different longevities resulting from a non-monetary effort (like exercising). We first present the laissez-faire and the first best. Like Becker and Philipson (1998), we find that the laissez-faire level of effort is too...

The Hungarian Personal Income Tax system is being transformed between 209 and 2013. Tax brackets and the previously existing tax credit is being abolished and this changes the net/gross income ratios in all income categories. This does not only lead to a significant loss in government's income,...

The long-term development of the social security system is a crucial policy issue in terms of both financial sustainability and adequacy, which constitute a difficult trade-off facing the policy maker. The particular complexity of this issue, also in the light of demographic dynamics and the...

This paper studies a problem of non linear taxation when individuals have different longevities resulting from a non-monetary effort (like exercising). We first present the laissez-faire and the first best. Like Becker and Philipson (1998), we find that the laissez-faire level of effort is too...

This chapter defines a universal public pension scheme (UPPS) as a government-mandated lifecycle longevity insurance scheme that transfers individual consumption from the working years to the retirement phase of the lifecycle. It discusses the differences in four UPPS designs defined with regard...