In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...

The anticipation of bad future events reduces currently experienced happiness and it may through this channel elicit detrimental behavioral responses. We explore this idea in the context of endogenous health and aging. We integrate physiological aging into a life-cycle model, calibrate it with...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...

The anticipation of bad future events reduces currently experienced happiness and it may through this channel elicit detrimental behavioral responses. We explore this idea in the context of endogenous health and aging. We integrate physiological aging into a life-cycle model, calibrate it with...

Cost-sharing is regarded as an important tool to reduce moral hazard in health insurance. Contrary to standard prediction, however, such requirements are found to decrease utilization both of efficient and of inefficient care. I employ a simple model that incorporates two possible explanations -...

Constantly rising expenditures for pharmaceuticals and uninformed consumers require government intervention in firms’ pricing strategies. To this end, reference pricing systems are frequently employed as regulatory mechanisms. This paper considers a duopoly market with vertically...

This paper addresses the question whether patients have a higher risk of death if they are admitted to a hospital during the night rather than during the day. Since hospital resources are reduced at nights, night admissions might be more dangerous. The empirical analysis is based on matching....

Experiments show that prioritizing registered donors on the waiting list impressively increases the willingness to register as an organ donor. We are the first to provide a comparative-statics analysis of the priority treatment by varying the number of bonus periods a registered person can skip...

Early intervention is considered as the optimal response to developmental disorders in children. However, relatively little is known about the effectiveness of the standard practice of so-called developmental screenings. We evaluate a nationwide program for preschoolers in Austria....