While risk selection within the German public health insurance system has received considerable attention, risk selection between public and private health insurers has largely been ignored. This is surprising since - given the institutional structure - risk selection between systems is likely...

Forcing a left-handed child to use the right hand for writing was long common practice in the Western world. Although it is rare now in these societies, it is still highly prevalent in developing countries and across various cultures. Forced right-hand writing is a rare early childhood...

This paper is an attempt to explain variations across EU regions in productivity growth and takes into consideration the important structure of the age-productivity relation of Human Capital. The study is fundamentally based on the theory of Fingleton?s model which analyses the spatial process...

The costs of HIV/AIDS programs are significant from a macroeconomic or fiscal perspective in a number of countries. Assessing the fiscal implications is complicated by the long lags between infection and the need for HIV/AIDS-related services, and the long duration over which these services...

We study risk-aversion and prudence in medical treatment decisions. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate the frequency and intensity of second- and third-order risk preferences, as well as the effect of the medical decision context. Risk preferences are assessed through treatment...

In this paper, we investigated the post-acquisition effects of privatization on hospital performance in Germany. Our findings show that there was a significant positive impact of privatization on hospital performance. Private for-profit privatizations, in particular, outperformed hospitals...

In this paper, we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using changes in compulsory schooling laws which took place from 1949 to 1969 as natural experiments. These law changed...