We congratulate Sabrina Schubert on successfully defending her doctoral thesis, ‘On Incentives and Strategic Provider Behaviour: Essays in Empirical Health Economics.’!

Sabrina’s dissertation examines how healthcare providers react to changing incentives in regulated markets, using recent reforms in Germany as natural experiments. It studies three areas: emergency hospital financing during COVID-19, reimbursement pathways for digital health applications, and conditional audit regimes, applying econometric methods. The research finds that emergency financing schemes during the pandemic were resilient to manipulation, digital health reimbursement increased market entry but mainly in quantity rather than quality, and performance-based audits reduced administrative burdens without changing coding or treatment behavior. Overall, the work highlights how policy design shapes provider behavior and provides evidence to improve healthcare regulation.

In the picture, from left to right, Prof. Dr. Simon Reif, Dr. Sabrina Schubert, and Prof. Dr. Harald Tauchmann.