We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of...

A draft of a reform towards "socially bounded competition" within the health care system indicates, first of all, that several areas of such an insurance system would have to be regulated by the state. Such a reform is much more complicated than text book models or the proposals of various...

The system of risk equalization payments among German Statutory Sickness Funds is currently under intensive political debate. While some participants claim that the enormous size of the equalization payments are detrimental to effective competition among funds, others argue that there are still...

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...

It is currently intensively discussed whether the system of risk structure adjustment (RSA) among German statutory sickness funds should be supplemented by morbidity indicators. It has been showed that employees who change their sickness funds are better risks and thus shift the morbidity...

Since 2003 German hospitals are reimbursed according to diagnosis related groups (DRGs). Patient classification in neonatology is based inter alia on birth weight, with substantial discontinuities in reimbursement at eight different thresholds. These discontinuities create strong incentives to...

Germany is one of the few OECD countries with a two-tier system of statutory and primary private health insurance. Both types of insurance provide fee-for-service insurance, but chargeable fees for identical services are more than twice as large for privately insured patients than for...

In developing and transition economies, microlending has become an effective instrument for providing micro businesses with the necessary financial resources to launch operations. In the industrialized countries, with their highly developed banking systems, however, there has been ongoing debate...

In a standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework, with sticky prices, the cross sectional distribution of output and inflation across a population of firms is studied. The only form of heterogeneity is confined to the probability that the ith changes its prices in response to a...

In this paper, we show, using the consumer's budget constraint, that the residuals of the trend relationship among consumption, aggregate wealth, and labour income should predict both stock returns and housing returns. We use quarterly data for a panel of 31 emerging economies and find that,...