The Effect of Lone Motherhood on the Smoking Behaviour of Young Adults We provide evidence that living with an unmarried mother during childhood raises smoking propensities for young adults in Germany. JEL Classification: I10, J12, J18

The Effect of Lone Motherhood on the Smoking Behaviour of Young Adults We provide evidence that living with an unmarried mother during childhood raises smoking propensities for young adults in Germany. JEL Classification: I10, J12, J18

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI holders.Further,we find that hospitals offering private insurees shorter waiting times as compared to SHI...

Recent evaluations of the impact of Turkish healthcare reforms on the efficiency of public hospitals suffer from simultaneous structural changes in the healthcare sector as well as from lack of data on some of the key ingredients of the reform. In this note, we analyze the major obstacles in a fair evaluation of the efficiency of public hospitals taking Sulku(2011)’s data envelopment analysis a...

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI holders.Further,we find that hospitals offering private insurees shorter waiting times as compared to SHI...

A model of costly medical malpractice claims, based on Bayes Rule, is developed to examine the effects of physicians being liable for actual damage under a negligence rule. This model is consistent with empirical evidence concerning the pattern of claims. It is shown that compensating actual damage does not provide physicians with appropriate incentives to spend the second best optimal amount o...

Researchers are often interested in combined measures such as overall ratings, indices of physical or mental health, or health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) outcomes. Such measures are typically composed of two or more underlying discrete variables. I show that estimating the effect of a treatment on the combined measure is biased with non-random treatment selection. I provide a solution to t...

Disease and Development Revisited Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) present evidence that improvements in population health do not promote economic growth. We show that their result depends critically on the assumption that initial health has no causal effect on subsequent economic growth. We argue that such an effect is likely, primarily because childhood health affects adult productivity. In our au...

The Wage Effects of Social Norms: Evidence of Deviations from Peers’ Body-Mass in Europe We investigate wage effects of deviations from peer group body mass index (BMI) to evaluate the influence of social norms on wages. Our approach allows for disentangling the influence of the social norm from any (anticipated) productivity effects associated with deviations from a clinically recommended BMI....

The realization that mere existence of health care facilities does not necessarily mean that they are readily accessible to the poorest section in the informal economy, tend to the evolution of a unique health insurance scheme, with contribution according to individual capacity. This paper examines several health insurance schemes catering to the informal sector as well as some critical issues ...