In this paper institutions are understood as rules of individual behavior. The focus is on the impacts of institutions on labor market decisions. Particular points are (1) the methods (or rules) that model individual decisions in neoclassical economics (rational choice approach), (2) implicit...

We analyze a client's choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for cases. The distinguishing feature is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer: an hourly rate, a fixed fee or a \mixed fee," which is a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for...

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia, South Africa, and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these...

This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) with labor market data. Investigating job changes, we combine the advantages of recent panel studies, which allow to control for unobserved heterogeneity of workers, and conventional...

The positive association between moderate alcohol consumption and wages is well documented in the economic literature. Positive health effects as well as networking mechanisms serve as explanations for the "alcohol-income puzzle." Using individual-based microdata from the GSOEP for 2006, we...

Although there is general consensus that the quality of human services has to be regulated, there is only limited discussion regarding the fundamental nature of these regulations and how they might in turn be altered to produce better services. This paper focuses on one human service in...

While surveying measured weight is widely unpractical in national samples, self-reported weight is a simple and inexpensive method of collecting data. This paper deals with data quality of reported body weight in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Previous research shows that data on...

Die Arbeit untersucht mittels IAB-Beschäftigtenstichprobe, Sozioökonomischem Panel und Informationen über tödliche Arbeitsunfälle die Existenz kompensatorischer Lohndifferentiale zur Bestimmung desWertes eines statistischen Lebens (WSL) in Deutschland. Querschnittsregressionen auf Basis...

This paper proposes a method to evaluate health losses or gains by looking at the impact on well-being of a change in health status. The paper presents estimates of the equivalent income change that would be necessary to change general satisfaction with life to the same extent as a change in...

Using representative survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for 2006, we show that the magnitude of such health inequality measures as the concentration index (CI) depends crucially on the underlying health measure. The highest degree of inequality is found when...