Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are more than twice as high for the...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany’s sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect...

This paper leverages a discontinuity in legal access to alcohol at age 16 to estimate its impacts on teenage drinking and crime in Germany, a country with very high consumption levels. Using detailed survey data and administrative crime records from 2005 to 2015, I detect considerable increases...

We estimate the causal impact of school smoking bans in Germany on the propensity and intensity of smoking. Using representative longitudinal data, we use variation in state, year, age cohort, school track, and survey time for implementation of such smoking bans to identify the effects of...

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

Using a novel dataset provided by the Connecticut Department of Health (CTDoH), this manuscript shows the necessity for and added utility from analyzing disaggregated COVID-19 outcome data for applied research. Connecticut is currently ranked the fourth highest state in death rates per 100,000...

The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of...

During the pandemic, many measures were taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Some of these measures, such as school closures, directly affected students. Children from different backgrounds are likely to have different abilities to cope with the challenges of the pandemic and associated...

Over the last years, public smoking bans have been introduced in most European countries. Unlike elsewhere, in Germany such bans were introduced at state level at different points in time, which provides important intra-country regional variation that can be exploited to identify the effects of...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for...