Mia Renee Herløv Jørgensen forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling
Mia Renee Herløv Jørgensen forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling:"Causes of Inequality in Health and Economic Resources: Empirical Essays in Economics"
Kandidat
Mia Renee Herløv Jørgensen
Titel: "Causes of Inequality in Health and Economic Resources: Empirical Essays in Economics"
Tid og sted: 25. februar 2021 kl. 14:30. Link til at logge på overværelse af forsvaret følger her:https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/9536476672
En elektronisk kopi af afhandlingen kan fås ved henvendelse til: charlotte.jespersen@econ.ku.dk
Bedømmelsesudvalg
- Lektor Torben Heien Nielsen, Økonomisk Institut, Københavns Universitet, Danmark (formand)
- Professor Anna Piil Damm, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus Universitet
- Professor Annette Vissing-Jørgensen, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Anstract
The Ph.D. dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters and considers some of the causes of inequality in income, wealth and health.
The first chapter studies the health consequences of living in a low-income neighborhood. We exploit that the Danish Spatial Dispersal Policy resettled refugees quasi-randomly across neighborhoods from 1986 to 1998, which allows us to isolate the causal health impact of living in a low-income neighborhood from self-selected settlement patterns. We find that refugees who were placed in the poorest neighborhoods were more likely to develop lifestyle related diseases and suggest that health behavior of close neighbors or the characteristics of the very local area are important to understanding how neighborhoods impact the health of their residents. The chapter is co-authored with Linea Hasager.
In the second chapter, we study if there is a connection between individuals' debt and their mental health. In specific, we study mental health problems following a somatic inpatient hospitalization using an event study model, where we allow the mental health response to depend on the individual's leverage prior to the hospitalization. We show that individuals with higher leverage are more likely to suffer from mental health problems after they experience a health shock than individuals with lower leverage, and our findings indicate that this could be driven by debt increasing the risk of financial distress associated with negative emotions such as stress or anxiety. The chapter is co-authored with Asger Lau Andersen, Rajkamal Iyer, Niels Johannesen and José-Luis Peydró.
The third chapter is concerned with how monetary policy affects income and wealth across the income distribution. To isolate the impact of monetary policy from other macroeconomic shocks we exploit exogenous monetary policy rate changes determined by the Danish currency peg. We document that softer monetary policy creates income and asset value gains for all income groups but that gains disproportionately benefit the top income groups. For all income groups the income gains are small in comparison with the asset value gains. Our findings are important for understanding both the distributional consequences, the transmission mechanism, and the aggregate effects of monetary policy changes. The chapter is co-authored with Asger Lau Andersen, Niels Johannesen and José-Luis Peydró.