This paper analyzes the decision to start smoking using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Our focus is on the role that parental smoking behavior plays for children's smoking initiation. The data used are a combination of retrospective information on the age individuals started...

This paper examines effects of the German social health insurance system's reference drug program (RDP) for prescription drugs on ex-factory prices. Moreover, we analyze whether manufacturers adapt prices of their products that are not subject to reference pricing as a consequence of changes in...

ABSTRACT An inverse relationship between job insecurity and sickness absence has been established in the literature, which is explained by employees avoiding to send signals of both poor health and uncooperative behavior towards the employer. In this paper, we focus on whether the same mechanism...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models, which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

In 1996, free choice of health insurers was introduced to the German social health insurance system. One objective was to increase efficiency through competition. A crucial precondition for effective competition among health insurers is that consumers search for lower-priced health insurers. We...

This paper investigates the cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals and their variation with ownership type. It is motivated by the empirical finding that private (for-profit) hospitals – having been shown to be less cost efficient in the past – on average earn higher profits than...

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