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...

This paper studies health effects from restricting the access of high-emission vehicles to innercities by implementing Low Emission Zones. For identification, we exploit variation in the timing and the spatial distribution of the introduction of new Low Emission Zones across cities in Germany....

Excessive alcohol consumption among young people is a major public health concern. On March 1, 2010, the German state of Baden-Württemberg banned the sale of alcoholic beverages between 10pm and 5am at off-premise outlets (e.g., gas stations, kiosks, supermarkets). We use rich monthly...

More than 70% of global e-mail traffic consists of unsolicited and commercial direct marketing, also known as spam. Dealing with spam incurs high costs for organizations, prompting efforts to try to reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters. Using modern econometric methods to reduce...

Although it has long been conjectured that having physicians in leadership positions is valuable for hospital performance, there is no published empirical work on the hypothesis. This cross-sectional study reports the first evidence. Data are collected on the top-100 U.S. hospitals in 2009, as...

Mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals are investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Our results show that innovative procedures play a key role in explaining the effect of ownership status...

Using a French exhaustive dataset, this paper studies the determinants of regional disparities in mortality for patients admitted to hospitals for a heart attack. These disparities are large, with an 80% difference in the propensity to die within 15 days between extreme regions. They may reflect...

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

Changes in medical expenses may force hospitals to reallocate their resources, which potentially come at the detriment of healthcare quality. Using data on the universe of German hospitals, I investigate resource reallocations between capital stock, human resources, services and the...

When a health shock hits a location, the healthcare infrastructure needs to be adjusted to meet the increased demand. This may be a challenge in developing countries because of limited hospital capacity. In this study, we examine the consequences of health shocks induced by air pollution in a...