We contribute to the literature on the determinants of socioeconomic health disparities by studying how the health behavior of adolescents may arise from the degree of communication between parent and child. Parent-child communication may function as a mediator between family background and...

In this paper we estimate the effects of college education on cognitive abilities and health exploiting exogenous variation in college availability and student loan regulations. By means of semiparametric local instrumental variables techniques we estimate marginal treatment effects in an...

This paper studies how stress affects the mortality risk. Using a flexible approach and allowing for timevarying treatment effects, I find no impact of stress on the short-run mortality risk but a substantially increase in the long-run. The effects are especially pronounced for men. I provide...

Equivalence scales are routinely applied to adjust the income of households of different size and composition. Because of their practical importance for the measurement of inequality and poverty, a large number of methods for the estimation of equivalence scales have been proposed. Until now, no...

We analyze the effect of household indebtedness on different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999–2009. To establish a causal effect, we rely on (a) fixed-effects methods, (b) a subsample of constantly employed individuals, and (c) lagged debt variables to...

Does media exposure affect health behaviours? And how? We exploit the idiosyncratic switchover to digital television across Italian regions which exogenously increased the number of free view national channels and we link this to high-frequency data on the supply of food-related contents on the...

Theoretical papers show that optimal prevention decisions in the sense of selfprotection (i.e., primary prevention) depend not only on the level of (second-order) risk aversion but also on higher-order risk preferences such as prudence (third-order risk aversion). We study empirically whether...

In recent years, the international community has expanded efforts in programme evaluation to improve the accountability of development projects. This paper presents approaches to implementing state-of-the-art evaluations in rural electrification projects, taking into account specific challenges...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between cross-border acquisitions and innovation activities at the firm level. In contrast to previous studies that analyze the effects on innovation in target firms, this paper investigates the effects on the investing firms. For the...

The contribution of this paper is to analyse the role of network interdependencies in a dynamic panel data model for German internal migration flows since re-unification. So far, a capacious account of spatial patterns in German migration data is still missing in the empirical literature. In the...