This paper evaluates the effects of a professionally assisted consumer-directed program (Personal Budgets) compared to the standard home care programs of the German long-term care insurance. The evaluation makes use of a long-run social experiment at seven different sites with a random...

Growing long-term care (LTC) needs represent a major challenge for our ageing societies. Understanding how utilization patterns of different types of care are influenced by LTC policies or changes in the population composition such as age patterns or health can provide helpful insight on how to...

Population aging and changing family patterns have made elder care an important issue. In 1994, German law-makers enacted a major reform in the country' s long-term care policy, the Dependency Insurance Act (DIA). How, and in what way, will the relative use of formal and informal long-term care...