In response to the growing burden of obesity, public primary prevention programs against obesity have been widely recommended. Several studies estimated the cost effects of diabetes prevention trials for different countries and found that diabetes prevention can be costeffective. Nevertheless,...

It is still an open question whether increasing life expectancy as such is causing higher health care expenditures (HCE) in a population. According to the "red herring" hypothesis, the positive correlation between age and HCE is exclusively due to the fact that mortality rises with age and a...

In einem neueren Beitrag diskutieren Pratt and Zeckhauser (JPE, 1996), welches Maß der marginalen Zahlungsbereitschaft (WTP) von Individuen für die Reduktion ihrer Sterbewahrscheinlichkeit bei öffentlichen Entscheidungen über gefahrenerhebliche Projekte verwendet werden sollte. Sie schlagen...

In the expected-utility theory of the monetary value of a statistical life, the so-called "dead-anyway" effect discovered by Pratt and Zeckhauser (1996) asserts that an individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for small reductions in mortality risk increases with the initial level of risk. Their...

The system of risk equalization payments among German Statutory Sickness Funds is currently under intensive political debate. While some participants claim that the enormous size of the equalization payments are detrimental to effective competition among funds, others argue that there are still...

In several OECD countries, public pay-as-you-go financed pension systems have undergone major reforms in which future retirement benefit promises have been scaled down. A consequence of these reforms is that especially in countries with a tight tax-benefit linkage, the retirement benefit claims...

The empirical relationship between income and longevity has been addressed by a large number of studies, but most were confined to men. In particular, administrative data from public pension systems are less reliable for women because of the loose relationship between own earnings and household...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side,...

Als ein möglicher Ausweg aus der drohenden Finanzkrise umlagefinanzierter Rentensysteme wird gegenwärtig eine Anhebung des Rentenzugangsalters von vielen favorisiert. Um allerdings Arbeitnehmern einen Anreiz zur Verlängerung der Lebensarbeitszeit zu geben, muss nach Auffassung der meisten...

Recently, the system of financing German sickness funds through payroll taxes has been criticized, and several experts have proposed a transition to uniform per-capita contributions as in the Swiss Social Health Insurance. However, the ongoing debate on these questions suffers from a certain...