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....

Reference prices constitute a main determinant of patient health care reimbursement in many countries. We study the effects of a change from an "external" (based on a basket of prices in other countries) to an "internal" (based on comparable domestic products) reference price system. We find...

This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexi- bility (Flex) Program on rural resident hospital choice and welfare. The Flex program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous reimbursement in return for...

This paper analyses the causal effects of educational mismatch on wages, individual health and job satisfaction. As educational mismatch is subject to unobserved heterogeneity in all of these fields, different identification strategies are applied to derive causal effects. In the wage...

This paper makes use of Hierarchical Bayes Models to model and estimate spatial health effects. We focus on Germany, combining rich individual-level household panel data with administrative county level information to estimate spatial county-level health dependencies. As dependent variable, we...

Living downtown has advantages because it allows for a convenient access to a variety of shopping and leisure activities as well as disadvantages due to the difficulties in finding a parking spot when parking capacity is scarce. We formally model the trade-off in a vibrant city district between...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of reference-dependent effects of unemployment on mental health. I show that the negative effect of unemployment on mental health depends on expectations about the future employment status. Several contributions to the literature have shown that the...

This study attempted to analyze the effect of regulation and political stability in allocation of mobile telecommunication investments in the African continent between year 2001 and 2011. In order to better understand the dynamics of investment in telecommunications, a framework was developed to...

This paper deals with the relationship between the traditional fixed-line, mobile and Voice over IP telephony in the EU.We estimate the supply and demand for fixed-line telephony using data on 25 EU member states for the 2006:Q2 - 2011:Q4 period. Employing instrumental variable approach, we...