Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show...

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 develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show first that life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of...

Using a retrospective monthly calendarium of individuals' major economic activities, this paper characterizes the monthly employment and unemployment rates and the monthly transition intensities between the states of employment, unemployment, and out-of-thelabor- force for the German labor...

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting. In six waves of German Socio-Economic Panel data, the extent to which own...

This paper studies the short-term impact of public smoking bans on hospitalizations in Germany. It exploits the staggered implementation of smoking bans over time and across the 16 federal states along with the universe of hospitalizations from 2000-2008 and daily county-level weather and...

It is often argued that the labor market outcomes of several "problem groups" of German workers suffer disproportionately in an economic downturn. These groups are women, the unskilled, and young and old workers, respectively. Using monthly individual-level data for West Germany for the period...

We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more...