The inefficiency of health care provision presents a major health policy concern in Germany. In order to address the issue of efficiency comprehensively - i.e. at the level of the entire system of health care provision rather than individual service providers - empirical analyses are often based...

Over the last years, public smoking bans have been introduced in most European countries. Unlike elsewhere, in Germany such bans were introduced at state level at different points in time, which provides important intra-country regional variation that can be exploited to identify the effects of...

This paper addresses the question of whether the effect of parental drinking on children’s later consumption of alcohol – which is frequently found to be of positive sign – exhibits a certain pattern of heterogeneity. In particular, if this effect is more prominent in the upper tail than...