Abstract This paper empirically investigates biased beliefs about the risks of smoking. First, it confirms the established tendency of people to over estimate the lifetime risk of a smoker to contract lung cancer. In this paper’s survey, almost half of all respondents overestimate this risk....

This paper uses Hierarchical Bayes Models to model and estimate spatial health effects in Germany. We combine rich individual-level household panel data from the German SOEP with administrative county-level data to estimate spatial county-level health dependencies. As dependent variable we use...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

This paper shows that long-term sick employees are unlikely to be very responsive to moderate monetary labor supply incentives. The paper, theoretically and empirically, evaluates the labor supply effects of cuts in statutory sick pay levels on long-term absenteeism in Germany. Cutting sick pay...

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on sickness absence behavior and labor costs. German federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100% continued wage pay for up to six weeks per sickness episode. In 1996 statutory...