Excessive alcohol consumption is a major health risk. It also has a negative impact on society in terms of road accidents, hospital admissions, and crime (Francesconi & James, 2019). Excessive alcohol consumption is particularly harmful for adolescents and young adults because it can negatively influence their brain development and increase the risk of alcohol dependence later in life (Enoch, 2006). However, in many countries, there is a high prevalence of excessive drinking among young people (World Health Organization, 2018b).Several policy measures have been introduced to tackle harmful drinking in general and among young people in particular. These have included minimum legal drinking age laws, drunk driving laws, and taxes on alcohol. In its most recent global status report on alcohol and health, the WHO argues: "The most cost-effective actions, or best buys, include increasing taxes on alcoholic beverages, enacting and enforcing bans or comprehensive restrictions on exposure to alcohol advertising across multiple types of media, and enacting and enforcing restrictions on the physical availability of retailed alcohol" (WHO, 2018a,b: 14). While there is a comprehensive literature on the consequences of minimum legal drinking age, underage drunk driving laws, and alcohol taxes for alcohol consumption and alcohol-attributable harm, 1 less was known about the health effects of policies regulating alcohol trading hours. However, a growing literature is filling this gap (see, e.g.

Many OECD countries have replaced per-diem hospital reimbursement with lump sum payments by diagnosis-related groups. This study analyzes hospital responses to a large-scale refinement of reimbursement practices in Germany on January 1, 2006, in which regulating authorities introduce reimbursements by treatment intensity in the market for stroke disorder. We find that the share of admissions receiving high-intensity treatments jumps by approximately 7 percentage points around the turn of the year. At the same time, a decrease in the average clinical severity of patients receiving these high-intensity treatments reveals that the marginal high-intensity treated patient in 2006 might be less appropriate for high-intensity treatments compared to 2005. We do not find accompanying (short-term) changes in the quality of care, such as decreases in in-hospital mortality.

This study addresses the question of how hospitals respond to the cross price incentives inherent in reimbursements based on diagnosis‐related groups (DRG). Unique market‐wide administrative data allow to exploit a natural experiment in Germany in which the relative attractiveness of greatly divergent reimbursements for clinically similar patients changes in the market for sepsis conditions on January 1, 2010. This natural experiment provides—unintentionally—extra reimbursements in cases in which hospitals reorganize transfers for deceasing patients to other facilities, alter the time of death, the choice of the condition being chiefly responsible for the hospital admission (primary diagnosis), or the intensity of mechanical ventilation. The differences‐in‐differences results demonstrate that hospitals primarily alter the primary diagnosis. As the choice of the primary diagnosis is the backbone of the design of modern DRG systems, the findings suggest that payment contracts between hospitals and payers based on modern DRG algorithms may not necessarily improve patient welfare.

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