Individuals’ socioeconomic status (SES) is positively correlated with their health status. While the existence of this gradient may be uncontroversial, the same cannot be said about its explanation. In this paper, we extend the approach of testing for the absence of causal channels developed...

The new Medicare Part D program provides prescription drug coverage for older Americans through highly subsidized and tightly regulated plans offered by private insurance firms. For most eligible individuals without coverage from other sources, obtaining Part D coverage would be rational, but it...

This essay studies the optimal timing for a firm to adopt a new process innovation in the presence of learning. A policy that has been implemented by governments throughout the world to reduce the cost level of infant industries with positive externalities, is to either subsidize the research of...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk that is independent of buyers’ private values or their signals regarding common value components. Esö and White (2004) showed theoretically that ex-post risk leads to precautionary bidding for DARA bidders: Agents reduce...

A government that wants to increase welfare by subsidizing either an industry’s sales or process innovations or both has to account for possible changes of production, when firms can foresee the government’s actions. In an optimal control framework welfare can be increased by subsidizing...

In applied microeconometric panel data analyses, time-constant random effects and first-order Markov chains are the most prevalent structures to account for intertemporal correlations in limited dependent variable models. An example from health economics shows that the addition of a simple...

For the estimation of many econometric models, integrals without analytical solutions have to be evaluated. Examples include limited dependent variables and nonlinear panel data models. In the case of one-dimensional integrals, Gaussian quadrature is known to work efficiently for a large class...

In recent years, consumer choice has become an important element of public policy. One reason is that consumers differ in their tastes and needs, which they can express most easily through their own choices. Elements that strengthen consumer choice feature prominently in the design of public...

We study the effects of time pressure on risky decisions for pure gain prospects, pure loss prospects, and mixed prospects involving both gains and losses. In an experiment we find that risk aversion for gains is robust under time pressure whereas risk seeking for losses turns into risk aversion...

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment. We relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant predictors of health...