This paper evaluates the contraceptive mandate as a public health initiative. It applies two fairly standard analytical frameworks used to scrutinize public health ethics, policy, and law issues. The first is a framework for analyzing public health ethics and deliberating about public health...

This paper examines the association between political partisanship and willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19 in the US. It shows that those counties with a stronger lead of the Republican candidate during the latest presidential electoral rounds displayed consistently lower vaccination rates...

We examine the natural rate of unemployment estimates of two international organizations (OECD and European Commission) and various release dates. Since estimates differ to a large extent, empirical research results which use natural rate estimates will also vary depending on the data source...

This course focuses on “impact investing 2.0” and was taught at the University of St. Gallen in 2016. Excluding illiquid assets and cash, the World Wealth Report 2016 calculated that globally, 31% of high net worth investment portfolios are based on the concept of social gain. Over the past...

In economics sense, recession is a general slowdown in economic activity over a long period of time, or a business cycle contraction. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way. Production as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, investment, spending,...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that...

Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for...