We examine the effect of single motherhood on children’s secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and...

In present day Germany, one in seven children is raised in a single parent household. We investigate the effect of single parenthood on children’s educational attainment, measured by the school track at the age 14, using ordered probit models. We study whether the effect of living in single...

The bivariate probit model is frequently used for estimating the effect of an endogenous binary regressor on a binary outcome variable. This paper discusses simple modifications that maintain the probit assumption for the marginal distributions while introducing non-normal dependence among the...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

This paper reports on a re-evaluation of the German health care reform of 1997. A previous evaluation found a limited effect of a 4.4 percent reduction of the number of doctor visits in a sample of pharmacy customers. The re-evaluation based on a representative household survey, the German...

This paper uses recent data for Germany and a new outcome variable to assess the consequences of parental separation on the well-being of youths. In particular, it is considered how subjective well-being, elicited from an ordinal 11-point general life satisfaction question, differs between...

I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent...

The paper studies the demand for foreign university graduates at the firm level. Using a unique dataset on recruitment policies of firms in four European countries, the determinants of demand for internationally mobile highly skilled employees are established. I investigate the number, origin,...

This paper is concerned with a comparison of immigrants and Swiss citizens with respect to level of education, labor market outcomes and healthcare utilization. The evidence is based on data for 1999 from the first wave of the Swiss Household Panel. In order to control for confounding...

The previous literature on the determinants of individual well-being has failed to fully account for the interdependencies in well-being at the family level. This paper develops an ordered probit model with multiple random effects that allows to identify the intrafamily correlation in...