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Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the household that accounts for time andmoney. This papermodels that link and analyzes the effect of intervention in the long-term-care market on female labor-market related decisions. It shows that women's fertility and their labor supply when young are affected by such policies. The overall effect can be decomposed into an opportunity-cost effect and a consumption-smoothing effect that each impact fertility as well as labor supply in opposite directions. Using survey data, the paper provides some evidence that in the member states of the European Union the consumption-smoothing effect is dominant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pay-as-you-go pension scheme is associated with positive externalities of having children and providing them with human capital. In a framework with heterogeneity in productivity, and stochastic and endogenous investment in fertility and education, we discuss internalization policies associated with child benefits in the pension formula. The second-best scheme displays both a benefit contingent on the contributions of children and a purely fertility-related component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the one hand, the right of independent secession protects single states from exploitation by the majority of states or by the entire union. On the other hand, it enables majorities in these states to discriminate after secession against ethnic, religious and political minorities which are better protected in the union as a whole. Therefore, the right of secession is a group right which possibly limits individual rights. Even if the individual right of emigration is guaranteed independently of membership, the right to secede from the union may limit the economic success of an economic and political union provided that it frightens minorities and, therefore, reduces mobility, country specific investment and productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The underprovision of public goods and the inefficiency of the migration equilibrium in a federation are widely discussed in the fiscal externality literature. The central authority can solve these problems by using inter-regional transfers. Moreover, it has been shown that an intervention of the central government is not necessary when the individuals are identical with respect to their marginal rate of substitution of private for public goods since local authorities will make efficient transfers to other regions by themselves. This paper, however, shows that an efficient population distribution in a federation is not guaranteed if individuals differ with respect to their marginal benefit from public consumption even if communities make transfers. The paper also demonstrates the importance of the preference revelation by the residence choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of inheritance tax, we examine the relationship between the structure of the tax and the strength of the social tax compliance norm. Based on the assumption that deviation from a legal norm is the more accepted the less its underlying principles are jeopardized, we argue that violating the tax compliance norm is socially justifiable if revenue requirements as well as equity and efficiency tax principles are not infringed upon by the evasion. Building on the literature on tax evasion, optimal inheritance taxation, and family economics, we hypothesize that a large non-declared amount of transfer and a high liquidity of the transferred asset decrease the acceptability of inheritance tax evasion and that both a high degree of kinship and young age of the heir increase the acceptance of evasion. Utilizing an experimental design embedded in a survey on the acceptance of inheritance tax evasion conducted in Germany in 2012, we confirm these hypotheses empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the relationship between the party affiliation of politicians at different levels of government and the spatial distribution of funding for research, development and innovation projects. In particular, we are investigating whether more federal grants are being granted in Germany for projects in federal states whose government is led by the same political party as the responsible ministry at federal level. Our dataset contains detailed information on publicly funded projects in Germany in the period 2010-2019. Using a fixed-effects estimation approach, we find a link between grant allocation and party affiliation of funding for research, development and innovation projects, in particular smaller ones. For these projects, political alignment is associated with an average increase in public funding by almost 10,000 euro. Our results suggest that public funds for research, development and innovation projects could be used more efficiently than they are., (© The Author(s) 2022.)