Health Plan Choice Abstract: This paper provides field evidence on (a) how price framing affects consumers’ decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be influenced by policymakers through simple regulatory efforts. In 2009, in...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

Numerous contributions in the literature show that household outcomes are influenced by the distribution of intra-household decision power expressed by bargaining indicators such as relative income of the spouses. Since women can expect a longer retirement period, increased female bargaining...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder- Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

This paper compiles a multidimensional poverty index for Germany. Drawing on the capability approach as conceptual framework, I apply the Alkire-Foster method using German panel data. I suggest new operationalizations for two dimensions: social participation and practical reason, the latter...