This paper investigates the potential of maternal and infant health programs to improve the life expectancy of women and children. We study a program trialed 1931-33 in seven Swedish medical districts, assembling individual data from parish records and aggregate data from annual reports of...

Climate change is making El Niños more frequent and intense. Therefore, understanding the effects of El-Niño-induced climatic events is essential to designing effective coping and adaptation strategies. We identify the impact of the 2015-16 El-Niño-induced large-scale drought on smallholder...

Obtaining significant levels of cooperation in public good and environmental games, under the assumption of players being purely selfish, is usually prevented by the problem of freeriding. Coalitions, in fact, generally fail to be internally stable and this cause a serious underprovision of the...

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...

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...

Competing hospitals may not only use quality of service to attract patients but also their specialization profile. Applying a Hotelling-duopoly and interpreting respectively quality and specialization as vertical and horizontal differentiation, we analyze the optimal allocation in both...

Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...

The strong association between income and mortality raises the question whether more generous social security systems could improve poor people’s health outcomes. Thus, in this paper, I analyze whether a major social security innovation, the introduction of social pensions targeted at poor...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and...

This paper analyses the volume-outcome relationship and the effects of minimum volume regulations in the German hospital sector. We use a full sample of administrative data from the unselected, complete German hospital population for the years 2005 to 2007. We apply regression methods to analyze...