Medicare Part D provides prescription drug coverage through Medicare approved plans offered by private insurance companies and HMOs. In this paper, we study the role of current prescription drug use and health risks, related expectations, and subjective factors in the demand for prescription...

This paper discusses the consequences of population aging and a fundamental pension reform – that is, a shift towards more pre-funding – for capital markets in Germany. We use a stylized closed-economy, overlapping-generations model to compare the effects of the recent German...

The paper considers transitions in the health and disability status of persons as they age. In particular, we explore the relationship between health and disability at younger ages (say 50) and health and disability in future ages. We consider for example, the future health path of persons who...

National housing markets differ in many aspects, making cross-national studies a fascinating subject. This article sheds light on housing demand in Germany and Japan. The primary task undertaken is to separate cross-national differences in the structure of housing demand by differing preferences...

The nested logit model has become an important tool for the empirical analysis of discrete outcomes. There is some confusion about its specification of the outcome probabilities. Two major variants show up in the literature. This paper compares both and finds that one of them (called random...

Der Abbau der Schwankungsreserve war in jüngster Zeit wieder einmal Gegenstand der politischen Diskussionen zur Stabilisierung des Rentenversicherungsbeitragssatzes. Im folgenden wird die Funktion der Schwankungsreserve näher untersucht und berechnet, in welchem Umfang sie vorgehalten werden...

We discuss the development of predictive choice models that go beyond the random utility model in its narrowest formulation. Such approaches incorporate several elements of cognitive process that have been identified as important to the choice process, including strong dependence on history and...

Population aging is just beginning to hit the industrialized countries in full force, and it will have a tremendous impact on capital markets. Capital market effects of population aging are particularly strong in continental European economies such as Germany, with their large pay-as-you- go...

We use a laboratory experiment to investigate the effect that assuming rational expectations has on structural inference in a dynamic discrete choice decision problem. Our experimental design induces preferences up to each subject’s subjective rates of time preference, leaving...

This paper shows that the capital market effects of population aging and pension reform are particularly strong in continental European economies such as France, Germany, and Italy. Reasons are threefold: these countries have large and ailing pay-as-you-go public pension systems, relatively thin...