type="main" xml:id="ecin12079-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> Alcohol consumption tends to make some people (unwillingly) tell the truth, hence social drinking can serve as a signal in social contact games. We provide empirical evidence which shows that social drinking can serve as a trust facilitating...

This paper investigates the cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals and their variation with ownership type. It is motivated by the empirical finding that private (for-profit) hospitals – having been shown to be less cost efficient in the past – on average earn higher profits than...

"This contribution gives an overview of the main results of our theoretical research on the stability and change of labour market institutions. We use so-called models of unionised oligopolies which are borrowed from the theory of industrial organization in order to analyse the effects of...

"This contribution gives an overview of the main results of our theoretical research on the stability and change of labour market institutions. We use so-called models of unionised oligopolies which are borrowed from the theory of industrial organization in order to analyse the effects of...

It has been a persistent phenomenon in many societies that a large proportion of alcohol consumption takes place in company of other people. While the phenomenon of social or public drinking is well discussed in disciplines such as social psychology and anthropology, economists have paid little...

This paper evaluates the impact of reference pricing on prices and co-payments in the (German) market for off-patent pharmaceuticals. We present a theoretical model with price-sensitive and loyal consumers that shows that a decrease in the reference price affects the consumers' co-payments in a...

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 antidiabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of...

An allocation rule that prioritizes registered donors increases the willingness to register for organ donation, as laboratory experiments show. In public opinion, however, this priority rule faces repugnance. We explore the discrepancy by implementing a vote on the rule in a donation experiment,...

Since 2009, German nursing homes have been evaluated regularly with quality report cards published online. We argue that most of the information in the report cards does not reliably measure quality of care, but a subset of seven measures does. Using a sample of more than 3,000 nursing homes...