This paper comprehensively studies the health effects of Daylight Saving Time (DST) regulation. Relying on up to 3.4 million BRFSS respondents from the US and the universe of 160 million hospital admissions from Germany over one decade, we do not find much evidence that population health...

The production of electricity on the basis of renewable energy technologies is a classic example of an impure public good. It is often discriminatively financed by industrial and household consumers, such as in Germany, where the energy-intensive sector benefits from a far-reaching exemption...

Based on hypothetical responses originating from a large-scale survey among about 6,000 German households, this study investigates the discrepancy in willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for green electricity across single-binary-choice and open-ended valuation formats. Recognizing that...

Using longitudinal data from two household surveys in 2017 and 2019, we analyze the determinants of climate skepticism in Germany. We find that nearly 20% of respondents state that they do not believe in climate change and more than 30% are doubtful that climate change is mainly caused by human...

The correct definition of the product market and of the geographic market is a prerequisite for assessing market structures in antitrust cases. For hospital markets, both dimensions are controversially discussed in the literature. Using data for the German hospital market we aim at elaborating...

Many health care systems aim to enhance hospital quality by encouraging competition. However, evidence on the relationship between quality and competition is inconclusive. My contribution to this literature is two-fold. Analyzing the relationship between competition and quality for the German...

We model the evolution of the number of individuals that are reported to be sick with COVID-19 in Germany. Our theoretical framework builds on a continuous time Markov chain with four states: healthy without infection, sick, healthy after recovery or after infection but without symptoms and...

We use the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of Covid-19 in Germany. Our identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when face masks became compulsory. Depending on the region we analyse, we find that face masks reduced the...

We study the impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on the spread and severity of COVID-19 in Germany. We combine data on county-by-day level on confirmed cases and deaths with information on local air quality and weather conditions and exploit short-term variation in the...

This paper studies the effect of the end of school summer breaks on SARS-CoV-2 cases in Germany. We exploit variation in the staggered timing of summer breaks across federal states which allows us to implement an event study design. We base our analysis on official daily counts of confirmed...