The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for...

The dramatic rise in the disability insurance (DI) rolls in the last 20 years has been the subject of much controversy. While the relationship between DI and labor force participation has been the subject of a growing literature, the mechanism of this transition from employment to DI remains...

Background: We propose using neighborhood characteristics as demand-related morbidity adjusters to improve prediction models such as the risk equalization model. Results: Since the neighborhood has no explicit 'place' in healthcare demand models, we have developed the 'Neighborhood and...

We study the effect of demand-side subsidies to old age care recipients on both caregiving and intergenerational transfer decisions. We exploit two quasi-natural experiments referring to the inception of a universal and unconditional caregiving allowance in 2007 and its subsequent reduction in...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for...

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to...

Zentrales Ziel der Pflegeversicherung war und ist, zu einer qualitativ guten pflegerischen Versorgung im Alter beizutragen – auch unabhängig von der individuellen familiären Situation und angesichts demografischer und gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen. Wenn es darum geht, 20 Jahre nach...

We study biased survival expectations across two domains and examine whether such biased expectations influence health and financial behaviors. Combining individual-level longitudinal data, retrospective, and end of life data from several European countries for more than a decade, we estimate...

To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate. In this paper, we study the German long-term health insurance...