We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in a mar- ket with two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally dierentiated (branded) drugs. Patients varying in their susceptability to medication are a prioriuninformed of available medication. Physicians making the prescription...

The aim of this paper is to study different regulatory effects on termination charges and social welfare. We employ a framework with a fixed network and two mobile networks competing in a market to study the following regulatory regimes: collusive and social welfaremaximising reciprocity,...

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on people’s mental wellâ€Âbeing in another industrialized country, more than 5000 miles distant. The meltdown significantly increased environmental concerns by 20% among the German population. Subsequent drastic policy action...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

High school dropout is an important policy issue and its determinants are a longstanding interest of economics. However, very little is known on the roles of noncognitive traits in influencing school dropoutdecisions. We employ voluntary forgone health care as a proxy for the underlying...

This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths,...

We study incentives for quality provision in markets where providers are motivated (semi-altruistic); prices are regulated and firms are funded by a combination of block grants and unit prices; competition is based on quality, and demand adjusts sluggishly. Health or education are sectors in...

This paper evaluates the impact of smoking bans on smoking using a policy change introduced by the UK government. We present a theoretical model of smoking that defines an individual’s life-cycle addiction and cigarette consumption in the presence and in the absence of a public smoking...

The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian...

We test the relationship between happiness and self-rated health in Italy. The analysis relies on a unique dataset collected through the administration of a questionnaire to a representative sample (n = 817) of the population of the Italian Province of Trento in March 2011. Based on probit...