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...

Over the last 20 years, acute-care hospitals in most OECD countries have built up costly overcapacities. From the perspective of economic policy, it is desirable to know how hospitals of different ownership forms respond to changes in demand and are probably best suited to deal with existing...

Quality report cards addressing information asymmetry in the health care market have become a popular strategy used by policymakers to improve the quality of care for older people. Using individual level data from the largest German sickness fund merged with institutional level data, we examine...

ABSTRACT We used an administrative dataset covering approximately 90% of all Germans to investigate the determinants of regional differences in the utilisation of ambulatory services in the year 2008. There are great regional differences in Germany, in GP, specialist and psychotherapist...

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...