A better understanding of the determinants of public health care expenditures is key to designing effective health policies. We integrate supply and demand-side determinants, factors from political economy and health policy reforms into an empirical analysis of the highly decentralized Swiss...

The 2001 White Paper and its development in the 3rd European Road Safety Action Program, represent a turning point in the history of the European Road Safety Policy. The possible determinants of the road mortality in the EU over (2000-2009) are examined using a panel data. Our main finding is...

Truck operations have recently become an important focus of academic research not only because road freight transport is a key part of logistics, but because trucks are usually associated with negative externalities including pollution, congestion and traffic accidents. While the negative...

Im Zuge des GKV-Modernisierungsgesetzes wurde zum 1.1.2004 eine so genannte Praxisgebühr von ?10 pro Quartal für ambulante Arzt- und Zahnarztbesuche erhoben. Neben einem Beitrag zur Konsolidierung der Finanzlage der GKV sollte die Praxisgebühr auch eine Verhaltensänderung der Versicherten...

Rates of childhood obesity have increased dramatically in the last few decades. Non-causal evidence suggests that childhood obesity is highly persistent over the life cycle. However little is known about the origins of this persistence. In this paper we attempt to answer three questions. First,...

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...

In the paper is considered identification of coefficients in equations explaining a continuous variable, say the number of sickness absence days of an individual per year, by cohort, time and age, subject to their definitional identity. Extensions of a linear equation to polynomials, including...

Identification of equations explaining a continuous variable, e.g., the length of sickness absence spells, by age, cohort and time (ACT), subject to their definitional identity is reconsidered. Various extensions of a linear equation to polynomials are explored. If no interactions between the...

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

The introduction of antibiotics as a medical treatment after World War II helped to dramatically increase life expectancy in the industrialized world. As a consequence of over-prescription the last decades ave however seen a sharp increase in prevalence of multi-resistant bacteria, disarming...