In times of peak demand hospitals may fail to deliver the high standard of treatment quality that they are able to offer their patients at regular times. To assess the magnitude of these effects, this study analyzes the effects of low staff-to-patients ratios on patient outcomes empirically. We...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure,and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a...

This paper investigates the relationship between health outcomes and variations in staffing levels as approximated by admissions on weekdays versus admissions on weekends. Because days of admission are potentially endogenous, we instrument on emergency admissions only, which are reasonably...

This paper analyses the link between educational attainment and unemployment risk in a French-German comparison, based on a discrete time competing risks hazard rate model applied to comparable microdata sets. The unemployment risk is broken down into the risk of entering unemployment and the...

This paper aims at formulating a theoretical model of educational attainment which is directly implementable empirically. The conceptual frame-work relies on the human capital theory, where individuals weigh the costs and the returns of education to decide on the optimal amount of education they...

This paper analyses the impact of family background, gender and cohort on educational attainment in France and Germany, relying on a theoretical model imbedded in the human capital theory. In a second step, the educational process is decomposed into school and post-school achievement. The same...

This paper investigates the relationship between health outcomes and variations in staffing levels as approximated by admissions on weekdays versus admissions on weekends. Because days of admission are potentially endogenous, we instrument on emergency admissions only, which are reasonably...

Using data on the valuation of Christmas gifts received by students in different fields at a German university, we investigate whether the endowment effect differs between students of economics and other respondents and whether it varies with the market price of the object under consideration....