The concentration of hospital capacities often involves closures of smaller hospital sites. While advocates of hospital concentrations emphasize increased quality of care and cost savings, some people may feel their health care is at risk. In this paper, I analyze the effect of 18 recent...

Many studies have shown that childhood circumstances can have long term consequences that persist until old age. To better understand the transmission of early life circumstances, this paper analyses the effects of health and financial situation during childhood on quality of life after...

Increasing long-term care demand raises the need of high quality care in nursing homes. This study analyses whether higher prices have a causal effect on quality of care in Swiss nursing homes and assesses the extent of cross-subsidization between different price components. We use...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the German Minimum Legal Drinking Age in reducing excessive drinking and alcohol-related hospital stays. We add to previous studies by looking at a considerably earlier cutoff at age 16, when teenagers in Germany gain legal access to beer, wine, and...

We discuss the impact of organizational workload on professional service outcomes, such as survival rates in hospitals. The prevailing view in the literature is that service quality deteriorates when organizational workload increases. In contrast, we argue that the relationship between workload...

This paper analyzes the effects of start-up costs of different technologies in providing electricity power. We explicitly solve a simplified linear formulation of the dispatch problem. Transforming this primal problem, we show that dominated technologies should be used only in the case of...