Do physicians respond to financial incentives? We address this question by analyzing the prescription behavior of physicians who are allowed to dispense drugs themselves through onsite pharmacies. Using administrative data comprising over 16 million drug prescriptions between 2008 and 2012 in...

Elections may take place in precarious environments that even pose health risks. I consider the case of Bavaria, where close to ten million people were asked to vote in the municipal elections on March 15 of 2020, to quantify the toll of elections in a pandemic. Despite declaring a state of...

To fight the spread of COVID-19, many countries implemented unprecedented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that uses an event-study approach to examine the effects of the German social distancing policies on (a) individual behavior and (b) the spread of the epidemic. Combining...

Variations in the use of medical resources, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. Whenever these variations cannot be explained by differences in patient needs or preferences, they may result in some individuals being over-treated, while others are...

The share of female physicians has risen in OECD countries in recent decades, but we know little about the effects of physician gender. We exploit quasi-random assignment of primary care providers (PCPs) to patients and estimate the causal effect of female PCPs on health care provision. Using...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an enormous impact on social and economic life and in particular. for human health care. In this paper, we document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying policies on individual health care utilization. We use detailed administrative...