The German population is aging. Since fewer children are born and simultaneously life expectancy rises, demographic changes will lead to a double aging process. The paper analyzes the effects of demographic changes on the public budget by applying a cointegration analysis to global budget...

The decision to contact a physician and the decision, how often to contact a physician, are based on different decision makers. We introduce a negative binominal distributed hurdle model that specifies the two stages of the decision process as different stochastic processes, and takes also care...

The paper develops and applies a Grossman-style health production model set up in discrete time to explain the impact of environmental pollution on the demand for both health and health care. In order to introduce the environment, our analysis takes changes in environmental conditions to...

As in most industrialized countries, the inequality regarding the distribution of house-hold incomes in Germany has steadily increased. By collecting taxes and granting mon-etary transfers, the government tries to affect the personal distribution of incomes. Whereas the supply of redistribution...

More than twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain, do citizens from former Communist countries still exhibit attitudes and preferences with regard to the welfare state and income redistribution that differ from those in the West? This paper seeks to answer this question for Germany after...

The importance of the physician-patient relationship for the health care market is beyond controversy. Most theoretical work is done in a principal-agent framework, dealing with moral hazard problems. Recent work emphasizes a two-sided asymmetric information relationship between physician and...

As in most industrialized countries, the inequality regarding the distribution of household incomes in Germany has steadily increased. By collecting taxes and granting monetary transfers, the government tries to affect the personal distribution of incomes. Whereas the supply of redistribution is...

Um 2015 einen ausgeglichenen Haushalt zu erreichen, soll der Bundeszuschuss an die Krankenkassen gekürzt werden. Doris Pfeiffer, Vorsitzende des Vorstands des GKV-Spitzenverbands, sieht durch diesen Beschluss zwar keine unmittelbaren Beitragserhöhungen auf die gesetzlich Versicherten zukommen....

The decision to contact a physician and the decision about how often to contact a physician are determined by different decisionmakers. We introduce a negative binomial distributed hurdle model that specifies the two stages of the decisionmaking process as different stochastic processes, while...