Tobias Müller

Bern University of Applied Sciences | BFH · Field of Health

This paper presents evidence on intra-household retirement externalities by assessing the causal effect of spousal retirement on various health behaviors and health status across 19 European countries. We identify partner's and own retirement effects by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design using retirement eligibility as exogenous instr...

Choice-based health insurance systems allow individuals to select a health plan that fits their needs. However, bounded rationality and limited attention may lead to sub-optimal insurance coverage and higher-than-expected out-of-pocket payments. In this paper, we study the impact of providing personalized information on health plan choices in a lab...

We study the impact of financial incentives on the prescription behavior of physicians based on a natural experiment that resulted from a recent reform in two large Swiss cities. The reform opened up an additional income channel for physician by allowing them to earn a markup on drugs they prescribe to their patients. We find that the reform leads...

We study hospital quality based on the occurrence of adverse events (complications, infections, and revisions) for two major elective procedures: inguinal hernia repair and primary hip replacement. We perform a multilevel logistic regression analysis and assess how LASSO, a supervised machine learning technique for variable selection, and Mundlak-c...

We study the effect of retirement on health plan choice based on a natural experiment resulting from the old-age pension eligibility legislation in Switzerland. 96% of individuals close to retirement are enrolled in the plan they chose in the previous year. We find that retirement breaks inertia for some individuals. Retirees switch to cheaper and...

We study the role of inattention as a key source of inertia in health plan choices. Our structural model shows that more than 90% of the elderly in Switzerland are inattentive and thus stick to the plan they chose in the previous year. We estimate sizeable switching costs even conditional on attention ($1,200) explaining part of the observed choice...

The effect of disability insurance (DI) benefits on the labor supply of individuals is a disputed topic in both academia and policy. We identify the impact of DI benefits on working full-time, working part-time or being out of the labor force by exploiting a discontinuity in the DI benefit award rate in Switzerland above the age of 56. Using rich s...

Prompted by the ongoing political and academic debate regarding decarbonization, we empirically study how firms respond to the introduction of a gradually increasing carbon tax. The Swiss context offers a unique opportunity to observe reactions to a carbon tax that increased by 400 percent between 2008 and 2015. Using firm-level panel data, we find...

The success of managed competition in health insurance largely depends on consumer switching behavior. Using proprietary data from a large private health insurer in Switzerland, we study how retirement, a life-transition event, influences the health plan choices of the elderly. We find that the elderly engage in ``premium targeting'' at retirement...

Procedural failures of physicians or teams in interventional healthcare may positively or negatively predict subsequent patient outcomes. We identify this effect by applying (non)linear dynamic panel methods to data from the Belgian transcatheter aorta valve implantation registry containing information on the first 860 transcatheter aorta valve imp...

Learning curves in health are of interest for a wide range of medical disciplines, healthcare providers, and policy makers. In this paper, we distinguish between three types of learning when identifying overall learning curves: economies of scale, learning from cumulative experience, and human capital depreciation. In addition, we approach the ques...