The inefficiency of health care provision presents a major health policy concern in Germany. In order to address the issue of efficiency comprehensively - i.e. at the level of the entire system of health care provision rather than individual service providers - empirical analyses are often based...

This paper examines the role of geography and culture in explaining bankruptcy. We adopt survival analyses to model the bankruptcy risk of a firm, allowing for time-varying covariates. Based on a large sample from all major sectors of the Swiss economy, we find the following results: (i) The...

We explore the relationship between litigation rates and the number of lawyers, in a typical supplier-induced demand (SID) frame. Drawing on an original panel dataset for the 169 Italian courts of justice between 2000 and 2007, we first document that the number of lawyers is positively...

Which of Germanys regions is the most attractive? Where is it best to live and work - on objective grounds? These questions are summed up in the concept "quality of life". This paper uses recent research projects that determine this parameter to examine the spatial distribution of quality of...

In this paper we focus on proximity as one of the main determinants of international collaboration in pharmaceutical research. We use various count data specifications of the gravity model to estimate the intensity of collaboration between pairs of countries as explained by the geographical,...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of immigration on trade flows, using Italian panel data covering very small geographical units (NUTS-3). Exploiting the very favorable setup offered by Italy's features - the very high number of countries of origin of immigrants ('super-diversity'),...

We analyze the effect of industry, region and time on new-business survival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relate to West German districts in the 1983-2000 period. The survival chances of start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by a high minimum...

Throughout the world, strong dispersions of both regional and national unemployment rates can be observed. The economic theory has developed various explanations on how this differences occur. Corresponding models mainly aim at institutional and political framework, insider effects, efficiency...

This paper provides a new data set of regional income inequalities within countries based on satellite nighttime light data. We first empirically study the relationship between luminosity data and regional incomes for those countries where regional income data are available. We subsequently use...

This paper studies the economic costs of conflicts at the country and ethnic group settlement level with light output data as measured by orbital satellites and conflict data spatially mapped to latitude and longitude coordinates. Using a worldwide dataset of 7,704 individual ethnic group...