This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's federal states. We exploit this variation to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic ...
More than half of German adults are overweight. Those most often affected include the elderly, poor, and individuals with poor education. Yet is overweight an issue that economists should address? Poor nutrition and lack of exercise play a major role in widespread diseases. One third of total health care expenditures are devoted to illnesses related to overweight. This is just one of the reasons why ...
Findings from consumer surveys and studies about nutritional labeling tend to be hard to compare, because the methodologies they use and questions they address are quite varied. Nevertheless, by evaluating these studies, we can obtain a good overview of existing nutritional labeling systems and consumer preferences. The present background article offers an overview of the studies frequently cited in ...
Mobile money is an innovation that allows financial transactions to be performed via a cell phone. Even in poor regions of Africa, almost everyone has a cell phone; therefore, mobile money could both contribute to the continent’s economic growth and ensure that no Africans are excluded from access to financial services. However, DIW Berlin data from Uganda show that mobile money is actually used less ...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: Cities worldwide have regulated the peer-to-peer short-term rental market claiming that those markets remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an increase in rents. However, at the time many of these policies were passed, empirical evidence for or...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: Antibiotic resistance is a severe problem within our current health systems. One of the main strategies to combat the rise of antibiotic resistance is to improve individual physicians' antibiotic prescribing practices. However, this strategy requires that differences in...
Abstract: User generated content is increasingly substituting content created by professionals. Local news that is generated by citizen journalists could be a promising way of supporting the struggling newspaper industry by reducing costs for professional journalists. We study a network of 122 local Austrian newspapers operating a hybrid model of citizen and professional journalism. We first...
Abstract: We study competition between Airbnb and hotel accommodations in Paris in 2017 to assess the welfare implications of Airbnb’s presence on hotels and travelers. The existing literature on the subject exclusively uses across city variation in Airbnb diffusion. Consequently, it does not take into account that the location of an accommodation within a city might be an important...