Recent healthcare reforms have sought to increase efficiency by introducing managed care (MC) as an alternative to conventional care. This article proposes an institutional change designed to let German consumers choose between the two settings through directing payments from the Federal Health...

In contrast to the United States, Germany decided to add margin squeeze as a legal offense to German competition law. In response to this, the problems in the gasoline market have caused major debates. This paper examines the pricing strategies by gasoline retailers and discusses the...

The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’...

It is still widely debated how non-cognitive skills can be affected by policy intervention. For example, universal music education programs are becoming increasingly popular among policy makers in Germany and other developed countries. These are intended to give children from poor families the...

This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to test the hypothesis that the increase in the per-shipment costs of imports from Japan due to the Fukushima disaster in 2011 lead to an increase in the lumpiness of imports from Japan. Using China and the USA as control groups it is found...

Nationally representative panel survey data for Germany and Australia are used to investigate the impact of working-time mismatches (i.e., differences between actual and desired work hours) on mental health, as measured by the Mental Component Summary Score from the SF-12. Fixed effects and...

This paper estimates the percentage of students who do not take up their federal need-based student financial aid entitlements and sheds light on determinants of this behavior. Against the background that educational mobility in Germany is low although extensive student financial aid for needy...

This study analyzes the importance of parental socialization on the development of children’s far right-wing preferences and attitudes towards immigration. Using longitudinal data from Germany, our intergenerational estimates suggest that the strongest and most important predictor for young...

We propose a new non-linear regression model for rating dependent variables. The rating scale model accounts for the upper and lower bounds of ratings. Parametric and semi-parametric estimation is discussed. An application investigates the relationship between stated health satisfaction and...