Germany is one of the few OECD countries with a two-tier system of statutory and primary private health insurance. Both types of insurance provide fee-for-service insurance, but chargeable fees for identical services are more than twice as large for privately insured patients than for statutorily insured patients. This price variation creates incentives to induce demand primarily among the privately ...
Mit der Lieferung der SOEP-Erhebungsdaten 2006 stehen erstmals im SOEP Daten eines verlässlichen Gesundheitsmaßes zur Verfügung, das nicht auf selbstberichteten Angaben beruht. Die in dem Bericht dokumentierten Daten werden in einem speziell aufbereiteten Datenfile im Rahmen eines gültigen SOEP-Datenweitergabevertrages der scientific-community zur Verfügung gestellt. Die Verwendung des Greifkrafttests ...
The German and Australian longitudinal surveys analysed here are the first national representative surveys to show that (1) people who continuously own a pet are the healthiest group and (2) people who cease to have a pet or never had one are less healthy. Most previous studies which have claimed that pets confer health benefits were cross-sectional. So they were open to the objection that owners may ...
Self-productivity is a crucial feature in the process of skill formation. It means that skills and health acquired at one stage in the life cycle enhance skills and health formation at later stages. This paper presents an empirical investigation of self-productivity in early childhood in Germany. The data are drawn from the mother-child questionnaire of the German Socio-Economic Panel for the birth ...
Hintergrund: Bislang ist die Verbreitung von Patientenverfügungen in der prä-klinischen Bevölkerung (das heißt, bevor es zu einer Krankenhausaufnahme kommt) noch kaum bekannt, da sich Studien hierzu zumeist auf Patienten- bzw. Arztbefragungen beziehen. Somit ist unklar, welche prä-klinischen Bedingungen die Verbreitung von Patientenverfügungen begünstigen. Von Interesse sind insbesondere persönliche ...
According to the "healthy immigrant effect" (HIE), immigrants upon arrival are healthier than locally born residents. However, this health advantage is supposed to diminish or even disappear over a relatively short period and the immigrants' health status is converging to that of the natives. The causes for this gradient of immigrants' health are subject to an ongoing discussion and the underlying ...
This paper aims at analyzing the determinants of the decision to start smoking using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The data used is a combination of retrospective information on the age individuals started smoking and, by tracing back these individuals within the panel structure up to the point they started smoking, information on characteristics at the age of smoking initiation. ...