During the COVID-19 pandemic, some goods suddenly became scarce due to panic purchases and stockpiling. The decision to hoard is influenced by higher-order beliefs. If an agent believes that other agents think that a good will become scarce, she concludes that these other agents will hoard, and...

Although learning-by-doing is believed to be an important source of productivity growth there is limited evidence that production volume affects productivity in a causal sense. We document evidence of learning-by-doing in a high-skill profession where stakes are high; advanced cancer surgery....

We model competition for a multi-attribute service, like health care services, where consumers observe attribute quality imprecisely before deciding on a provider. High quality in one attribute is more important in terms of ex post utility. Attribute quality is stochastic, providers can shift...

The German nursing home industry rapidly grows due to the permanent increase of people in need of long-term care, in particular. At the same time a large share of residents in German nursing homes is in need of social assistance. In a simple spatial competition model we show that the presence of...

This paper estimates the effect of participating in the optional tariff "Premium Refund", an implicit optional deductible tariff, on different measures of medical demand. Specifically, it analyzes whether participating in the tariff can reduce ex-post moral hazard. Therefore, I use panel data...

Quality report cards addressing information asymmetry in the health care market have become a popular strategy used by policymakers to improve the quality of care for elderly. Using individual level data from the largest German sickness fund merged with institutional level data, we examine the...

The German health care reform of 2004 imposes a charge of 10 Euro for the first visit to a doctor in each quarter of the year. Exploiting random variation in the interview day of the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study finds a substantial effect of the new fee on the probability of visiting...

Debate over the effects of public versus private health care financing has been, and continues to be, active in both academic outlets and policy circles. Theoretical literature on parallel health care financing is often built on untested behavioural assumptions and the empirical evidence...

We analyse the effect of a change in the remuneration system for physicians on the lengths of treatments of patients as measured by the number of doctor visits using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel over the period 1988- 2003. In particular, we analyse the introduction of a fixed budget...