One institutional peculiarity of the German health care system is the division of health insurance into public and private spheres. Another one is the financing of public insurance. Contribution payments are wage-related and shared between employers and employees. The article presents a...

Mit der Einführung des Gesundheitsfonds und der Gewährung erweiterter Vertragsfreiheiten an die gesetzlichen Krankenkassen ist Deutschland auf einem guten Weg. Die Reform mag in mancher Beziehung nicht weit genug gehen, sie hat aber schon jetzt erkennbar bewirkt, dass sich die Krankenkassen...

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient not to distort the choice of education. In general this implies distorting the saving decision. Hence a strict order of policy priority is derived. Efficient tax policy...

E. D. Domar and R. A. Musgrave (1944) showed that taxing the return from risky investments may encourage risk taking. The effect has come under attack as being one of partial analysis that would disappear in general equilibrium. This paper shows that the contrary is true if capital markets...

Applying the theory of yardstick competition to the schooling system, we show that it is optimal to have central tests of student achievement and to engage in benchmarking because it raises the quality of teaching. This is true even if teachers’ pay (defined in monetary terms) is not...

This paper suggests that the optimal tax system should favour market-produced services which are close substitutes for home-produced services. First, we modify the classical Corlett-Hague rule for optimal commodity taxation by showing that it may be optimal to impose a relatively low tax rate on...