It is currently intensively discussed whether the system of risk structure adjustment (RSA) among German statutory sickness funds should be supplemented by morbidity indicators. It has been showed that employees who change their sickness funds are better risks and thus shift the morbidity...

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of...

A draft of a reform towards "socially bounded competition" within the health care system indicates, first of all, that several areas of such an insurance system would have to be regulated by the state. Such a reform is much more complicated than text book models or the proposals of various...

The system of risk equalization payments among German Statutory Sickness Funds is currently under intensive political debate. While some participants claim that the enormous size of the equalization payments are detrimental to effective competition among funds, others argue that there are still...

As part of the Statutory Health Insurance Modernization Act a co-payment of €10 per quarter for the first contact at a physician's or a dentist's office has been introduced with effect of 1stJanuary 2004. Apart from contributing to the financial consolidation of the Statutory Health Insurance...

Since 2003 German hospitals are reimbursed according to diagnosis related groups (DRGs). Patient classification in neonatology is based inter alia on birth weight, with substantial discontinuities in reimbursement at eight different thresholds. These discontinuities create strong incentives to...

This paper analyses the determinants of Chinese direct investment (DI) in the European Union (EU). Evidence is based on panel Poisson models drawing on two investment monitors for individual projects. We distinguish between the numbers of greenfield investments (GIs) and mergers and acquisitions...

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

Dynamic discrete choice models usually require a general specification of unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we apply Bayesian procedures as a numerical tool for the estimation of a female labor supply model based on a sample size which is typical for common household panels. We provide...

A simulation study designed to evaluate the pseudo-R2 T proposed by Spiess and Keller (1999) suggests that this measure represents the goodness- of-fit not only of the systematic part, but also of the assumed correlation structure in binary panel probit models.