Several European countries have followed the United States in introducing prospective payment for hospitals with the expectation of achieving cost efficiency gains. This article examines whether theoretical expectations of cost efficiency gains can be empirically confirmed. In contrast to...

Many governments subsidize regional rail service as an alternative to road traffic. This paper assesses whether increases in service frequency reduce road traffic externalities. We exploit differences in service frequency growth by procurement mode following a railway reform in Germany to...

People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we...

The bivariate probit model is frequently used for estimating the effect of an endogenous binary regressor on a binary outcome variable. This paper discusses simple modifications that maintain the probit assumption for the marginal distributions while introducing non-normal dependence among the...

This paper studies the evolution of life satisfaction over the life course in Germany. It clarifies the causal interpretation of the econometric model by discussing the choice of control variables and the underidentification between age, cohort and time effects. The empirical part analyzes the...

Awards—widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere—are motivators that derive their value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank allow us to estimate the causal impact on effort when...

Understanding the mechanism through which financial globalization affects economic performance is crucial for evaluating the costs and benefits of opening financial markets. This paper is a first attempt at disentangling the effects of financial integration on the two main determinants of...

This paper studies the responses of residential property and equity prices, inflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006. We estimate VARs for individual economies and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries on...

This study investigates the prevalence and extent of altruism by examining the relationship between parents' and their adult children's subjective well-being in a data set extracted from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In order to segregate the share of parents with altruistic preferences from...

This study uses Markowitz mean-variance portfolio theory with forecasted data for the years 2005 to 2035 to determine efficient electricity generating technology mixes for Switzerland. The SURE procedure has been applied to filter out the systematic components of the covariance matrix. Results...