In Germany, private health insurance covers more innovative and costly treatments than public insurance. Moreover, privately insured individuals are treated preferentially by doctors. In this article, I use subjective health data to examine whether these superior features of private insurance...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the impor-tance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

To equalize differences in health plan premiums due to differences in risk pools, the German legislature introduced a simple Risk Adjustment Scheme (RAS) based on age, gender and disability status in 1994. In addition, effective 1996, consumers gained the freedom to choose among hundreds of...

This paper analyses the relationship between locus of control (LOC) and the demand for supplementary health insurance. Drawing on longitudinal data from Germany, we find robust evidence that individuals having an internal LOC are more likely to take up supplementary private health insurance...

This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel...

This paper empirically assesses the selection effects and determinants of the demand for supple-mental health insurance that covers hospital and dental benefits in Germany. Our representative dataset provides doctor-diagnosed indicators of the individual's health status, risk attitude, demand...

This study is the first to estimate the price elasticities of demand for both medical rehabilitation programs and treatment at health spas. In Germany, the Statutory Health Insurance (SHI) covers both forms of therapy if administered in authorized medical facilities on referral from a physician....

This paper discusses how household panels in general - and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in particular - can serve as reference data for researchers collecting datasets that do not represent the full universe of the population of interest (e.g., through clinical trials, intervention...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

We study the impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on the spread and severity of Covid-19 in Germany. We combine data on county-by-day level on confirmed cases and deaths with information on local air quality and weather conditions and exploit short-term variation in the...