During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals faced a unique predicament. Hospital care was urgently needed and society took efforts to prevent overwhelming hospitals. However, hospitals in case-based reimbursement schemes faced financial problems because of cancelled elective care visits and...

The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to offer cost sharing reductions (CSRs) to low-income consumers on the Marketplaces. We link 2013-2015 All-Payer Claims Data to 2004-2013 administrative hospital discharge data from Utah and exploit policy-driven differences in the actuarial value of CSR...

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551 thousand nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

We show that review platforms reduce healthcare interruptions for patients looking for a new physician. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy using physician retirements as a 'disruptive shock' that forces patients to find a new physician. We combine insurance claims data with...

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...

We study how the threat of entry affects service quantity and quality of general prac- titioners (GPs). We leverage Germany's needs-based primary care planning system, in which the likelihood of new GPs reduces by 20 percentage points when primary care coverage exceeds a cut-off. We compile...

Maternity unit closures are increasingly common in areas with low birth rates, resulting in diminished competition between units. We examine how competition affects the quality and amenities of the remaining maternity units in Germany. To address potential endogeneity in the level of...

Digital therapeutics are increasingly used to complement traditional health care. In a pioneering move, Germany became the first country to introduce a structured regulatory framework - known as the DiGA scheme - that enables developers of digital therapeutics to be reimbursed in the statutory...

Smoking bans have been widely implemented, despite mixed evidence on their effectiveness in reducing firsthand smoking. This paper provides novel insights into the dynamic impacts of smoking bans in the context of a large developing country, Brazil, that had more than 18.6 million regular...

The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked hope that firm digitalisation will result in long-lasting reductions in mobility and related carbon missions via the use of working from home and online services. In this study, we quantify the extent to which firm digitalisation can be associated with changes...