BACKGROUND A growing number of German hospitals have been privatized with the intention of increasing cost effectiveness and improving the quality of health care. Numerous studies investigated what possible qualitative and economic consequences these changes issues might have on patient care.However, little is known about how this privatization trend relates to physicians' working conditions an...

The research objective of this paper is to test whether health conditions and health behavior are related to home ownership. This question has not yet been examined quantitatively in the existing literature. Our estimation results show that homeowners consistently report better health and less physical problems. The significance of home ownership remains even after controlling for financial ass...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationshipspecific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting from different initial conditions. However, in contrast to the property rights approach, the most eff...

Using life-history survey data from eleven European countries, we investigate whether childhood conditions, such as socioeconomic status, cognitive abilities and health problems influence portfolio choice and risk attitudes later in life. After controlling for the corresponding conditions in adulthood, we find that superior cognitive skills in childhood (especially mathematical abilities) are p...

Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such government rent-seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership serves as a second-best commitment mechanism, through which the government agency will restrain itself from the rent-seeking activity and may even offer the manager assistance in the ...

This paper characterizes the optimal dynamic contract between risk-averse entrepreneurs and risk-neutral investors in an infinite horizon setting with information asymmetry. Under certain conditions, the optimal contract can be implemented with the entrepreneur’s ownership of some of the firm’s shares (insider ownership). This ownership evolves over time and tends to decrease as the entrepreneu...

Race conditions occur when two incorrectly synchronised threads simultaneously access the same object. Static type systems have been suggested to prevent them. Typically, they use annotations to determine the relationship between an object and its “guard” (another object), and to guarantee that the guard has been locked before the object is accessed. The object-guard relationship thus forms a t...