https://hdl.handle.net/10419/145457 2026-10-07T01:57:34Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/162045 Title: Reimbursement Schemes for Hospitals: The Impact of Case and Firm Characteristics Authors: Wohlschlegel, Ansgar; Feess, Eberhard; Mueller, Helge Abstract: We use data from a German health insurer to study how the impact of switching from a fee for service system (FFS) to a high powered incentive scheme (prospective payment system; PPS) depends on the characteristics of patients and hospitals. As hospitals had a transition period of several years to complete the switch, we can adopt a difference-in-differences approach by adding hospital fixed effects and a time trend. Our results support hypotheses drawn from an incentive and selection perspective: PPS reduces the length of stay of older relative to younger patients, of more severe relative to less severe cases, and in smaller relative to larger hospitals. Hospitals which adopted PPS earlier provide higher quality under PPS as proxied by the case-specific readmission rate. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/168410 Title: Does willingness to pay increase with the number and strictness of sustainability labels? Authors: Tebbe, Eva; von Blanckenburg, Korbinian Abstract: Labels signaling sustainable product attributes are gaining importance, although uncertainty concerning the environmental, micro- and macroeconomic benefits of such labels persist. One of the questions still incom-pletely answered is whether Willingness To Pay (WTP) varies with a gradually increasing number of labels on a food product. In order to answer this question, we conducted a laboratory experiment with 191 student respondents, testing consumer valuations of different labeling strategies. Using the Becker-DeGroot-Mar-schak mechanism, WTP for 15 food products was measured. The products were endowed with up to six different sustainability labels, such that each grocery item was available in eight product versions. For perishable, non-perishable and plant-based products, the results indicate that participants are prone to allo-cating WTP-premiums to labeled products, more than to unlabeled products. For animal products, however, labels do not influence WTP significantly. Furthermore, the premiums do not vary with an increasing num-ber of labels, irrespective of whether the labels signal substitute or complementary sustainability infor-mation. The results are not entirely in line with normative notions of magnitude variation, but rather with the behavioral economic concept of embedding effects. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/145554 Title: The Quest for Status and R&D-based Growth Authors: Prettner, Klaus; Hof, Franz Abstract: We analyze the impact of status preferences on technological progress and long-run economic growth. For this purpose, we extend the standard relative wealth approach by allowing the two components of the representative household's wealth, physical capital and shares, to differ with respect to their status relevance. Relative wealth preferences imply that the effective rate of return of saving in the form of a particular asset is the sum of its market rate of return and its status-related extra return. It is shown that the status relevance of shares is of crucial importance: First, an increase in the intensity of the quest for status raises the steady-state economic growth rate only if the status-related extra return of shares is strictly positive. Second, for any given degree of status consciousness, the long-run economic growth rate depends positively on the relative status relevance of shares. Third, while in the standard model the decentralized long-run economic growth rate is less than its socially optimal counterpart, the wealth externalities in our model counterbalance this distortion to some extent provided that shares matter for status. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/145799 Title: The Labor Market Performance of Immigrants in Germany Authors: Beyer, Robert Abstract: The paper uses a large survey (GSOEP) to analyze the labor market performance of immigrants in Germany. It finds that new immigrant workers earn on average 20 percent less than native workers with otherwise identical characteristics. The gap is smaller for immigrants from advanced countries, with good German language skills, and with a German degree, and larger for others. The gap declines gradually over time. Less success in obtaining jobs with higher occupational autonomy explains half of the wage gap. Immigrants are also initially less likely to participate in the labor market and more likely to be unemployed. While participation fully converges after 20 years, immigrants always remain more likely to be unemployed than the native labor force. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z