The study highlights the large and rising cost of the disease: an estimated $132 billion, or approximately $92 billion in direct healthcare expenditures and $40 billion in lost productivity attributed to missed workdays, disability, and early mortality. After adjusting for differences in...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

At present, a first round of hospital benchmarking as required by German law on health care reform takes place. After extensive discussions between hospitals and insurance companies, which are jointly responsible to deliver benchmarking results, a method with some peculiar characteristics was...

In many countries the shadow employment has a very high priority among policymakers. A new time series for this component of the labour market has been recently released by the Italian institute of statistics. Taken together they give the motivation and the occasion for a fresh analysis of the...

We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are considerably more trusting and...

In this paper labour productivity growth and its impacts are studied at the industry level. The development of productivity is analysed in 54 industries in 14 EU countries and in the US between 1979 and 2001. The conclusion of the study is that the industry structure that leads to fast...

The article examines the optimal choice of monitoring intensity when workers face external incentives (incentives that are not provided by the firm), such as tips, satisfaction from working well, or the desire to build reputation in order to be more attractive to other employers. Increase in...

This paper highlights the social costs from non-price rationing of the labour force due to the minimum wage. By short-circuiting the ability of low reservation-wage workers to underbid high-reservation wage workers, the minimum wage interferes with the market's basic function of grouping the...

Based on a new panel dataset created in close cooperation with one of the largest temporary help agencies (THAs) in Germany, this paper presents novel evidence on key aspects of temporary agency work, a segment of the labor market that despite its growing importance remains underresearched. In...

Based on a new panel dataset created in close cooperation with one of the largest temporary help agencies (THAs) in Germany, this paper presents novel evidence on key aspects of temporary agency work, a segment of the labor market that despite its growing importance remains underresearched. In...