For empirical analysis and policy-oriented recommendation, the precise measurement of individual health or well-being is essential. The problem with variables based on questionnaires such as self-assessed health is that the answer may depend on individual reporting behaviour. Moreover, if...

The importance of the physician-patient relationship for the health care market is beyond controversy. Recent work emphasizes a two-sided asymmetric information relationship between physician and patient. In contrast to most work looking only at the physician's perspective, our paper...

It is the purpose of this study to forecast the future development of total expenditures of sickness funds in Germany under the assumption that present institutions remain unchanged. Previous approaches using present age-specific expenditure data are systematically flawed. In contrast, we use...

In many countries, policy makers try to increase quality and efficiency in the hospital sector by fostering competition. The German hospital market is a good example of this approach and the challenges that come with it. We focus on market concentration which is both a result of and a potential...

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...

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...