At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, inflation in Israel exceeded 100 percent. Using the twenty percent samples of the 1972, 1983, 1995, and 2008 Israeli Census, we show that inflation had a substantial negative effect on the decision to marry. More specifically, we show that high inflation influenced marriage by creating economic uncertainty. Without the episode of high inflation, the decline in marriage would have been delayed for several years. We also show that there were educational differences in the effect of inflation on marriage formation.

The empirical legal study of tax law has developed greatly in recent years and has yielded many insights into the judiciary in particular and the legal system as a whole. This article continues this process by evaluating, through the prism of tax litigation and based on theories of analyzing judicial decision making, the effect of law reforms on win rates and whether win rates can help predict future law reforms. The analysis is based on a comprehensive database (census, not sample) of 1,330 tax decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court (ISC), divided into seven tax categories, and covering 60 years of tax jurisprudence since Israel's establishment . The data enabled us to find changes in win rates over time, among different tax categories, and in relation to several tax reforms. The detailed analysis found that law reforms have a significant effect on win rates and that win rates have a predictive ability for future law reform. These findings strengthen the legal model and the neo-institutional theory and do not provide support for selection effect theory or the attitudinal model regarding their explanatory function in analyzing judicial decisions.

Over the past four decades, the more developed countries have experienced a marked decline in the marriage rates of both men and women. The reasons for the decline remain a debated issue. Three explanations predict that the decline in marriage is a period effect, while two predict that it is a birth cohort effect. To determine whether the decline is a period or a cohort effect, this study performed an age-period-cohort analysis. Using data from Israel, our results show that both cohort replacement and period factors were important. Until 1990-1994 the decline in marriage was a period effect, whereas after 1990-1994 the decline was a cohort effect. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for the three major explanations of the decline in marriage.

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The concerns about inflation as a result of the current financial crisis and the U.S. budget deficit challenge the social order, including taxation. Based on the historical U.S. experience and discourse on this issue, the article focuses on the relationships between adjusting the tax system for inflation and the general attitude towards adjustment for inflation in the social order. The article offers a new insight which is very different from the current research. The nominalism/adjustism culture that dominates the social order is placed at the center of the analysis. There is “equilibrium” between the scope of adjustment in the social order and in the tax regime. Advancing adjustment of the tax regime requires that it also be promoted in the general social order. This cultural paradigm plays a significant role in the tax response to inflation, including the scope and character of that adjustment regime. This approach erodes the literature’s conservative approach arguing that classical tax policy consideration like cost-benefit analysis is the most effective factor on the adjustment issue. The article argues that adopting an adjusted tax regime is largely dependent on the existence and extent of a general culture towards the concept of “money”: Is the prevailing culture one of nominalism or adjustism?This paradigm explains the reality in the U.S. in the past with regards to adjustment for inflation. The sophisticated American discourse on adjusting the income tax regime for inflation, which first took place in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, was unproductive from the start, and was doomed to failure because the U.S. culture of adjustism was not sufficiently ripe for justifying or permitting a “legitimate” social decision on adjusting the tax regime. The lessons from the past are that advancing adjustment of the tax regime requires promoting adjustment of the general social order. Adjusting the income tax regime without adjusting the general social order would be, culturally, a tough mission and even impossible.