This paper examines the effect of copayments on doctor visits using the German health care reform of 2004 as a natural experiment. In January 2004, copayments of 10 euros for the first doctor visit in each quarter have been introduced for all adults in the statutory health insurance. Individuals...

Huge underinvestment increases the need for private borrowing in the German hospital sector, the access to which is partly determined by the probability of default (PD) of individual hospitals. Using ordinary least squares and quantile regression techniques this paper provides first empirical...

This paper examines effects of reference pricing for prescription drugs in German social health insurance based on econometric panel data methods. We analyze the effect on ex-factory prices. Moreover, we investigate whether manufacturers adapt prices of their products not subject to reference...

In this paper, a general Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition is derived that can also be applied to non-linear models, which allows the differences in a non-linear outcome variable between two groups to be decomposed into a part that is explained by differences in observed characteristics and a part...

Even though European labor markets are characterized by high average unemployment, there is a shortage of high-skilled labor, leading many European economists to argue for an immigration policy directed at actively recruiting highly qualified workers from abroad. It has further been argued that...