The growing literature on the potential role of energy resources around the Caspian Sea is dominated by geoplitics whereas economic aspects have been largely neglected thus far. The relevance of Caspian oil and gas reserves continues to be praised, though objective data on production and exports...

As part of the Statutory Health Insurance Modernization Act a co-payment of €10 per quarter for the first contact at a physician's or a dentist's office has been introduced with effect of 1stJanuary 2004. Apart from contributing to the financial consolidation of the Statutory Health Insurance...

Empirical evidence from several countries reveals that self-rated health is a valid predictor of mortality. So far, there have been no studies conducted for Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) we confirm the relationship between self-rated health and mortality...

Leisure is an important domain of life in modern societies. To find out who participates in what leisure activities, two different theoretical approaches are available. Classical inequality theories posit that differences in leisure activities are strongly connected with social position. In...

According to the economic theory of crime, a rise in expected punishment (the product of probability and severity of punishment) results in a reduction of crime due to deterrence. What appears to be a simple and straightforward hypotheses turns out to be a demanding task for empirical...

In most OECD-countries, labour demand has shifted from unskilled to skilled over time. Many analyses of this phenomenon focus on either the effect of technical change, capital-skill complementarity or labour-labour substitution. We present a more general analysis of labour demand in Norwegian...