Excessive alcohol consumption among youth and young adults is a major public health concern. On March 1, 2010 the German federal state of Baden-W rttemberg banned the sale of alcoholic beverages between 10pm and 5am in off-premise outlets (e.g. kiosks, petrol stations, supermarkets). We use rich...

Child care and education are important inputs in the human capital production function. The research of Nobel prize winner James Heckman shows that skills are built from the early childhood on and increase the returns of later educational inputs, in short: skill begets skill. Therefore, it is...

This volume was prepared by Susanne Link during her stay at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute of Economic Research. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Departure of the University of Munich in...

A large and highly used number of treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption ("selection on observables") which is fundamentally non testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe both variables that affect treatment...

We study the effects of a labor-intensive health care sector within an R&D-driven growth model with overlapping generations. Health care increases longevity and labor participation/productivity. We examine under which conditions expanding health care enhances growth and welfare. Even if the...

Reference prices constitute a main determinant of patient health care reimbursement in many countries. We study the effects of a change from an "external" (based on a basket of prices in other countries) to an "internal" (based on comparable domestic products) reference price system. We find...