Health economics
Our research group makes substantial contributions to health economics through rigorous empirical analysis of healthcare systems, public health interventions, and the economic consequences of health policies in the short and long term, and across generations. Our work spans micro-levelstudies of individual health behaviours to macro-level analyses of healthcare systems and population health, with particular focus on the Nordic countries, especially Denmark and Sweden.
Combining causal analysis with rich Nordic administrative data, which provide exceptional opportunities for long-term follow-up, we generate evidence that is scientifically robust and policy-relevant. Our findings demonstrate that health interventions yield substantial economic returns and that healthcare system efficiency can be improved through evidence-based restructuring.
Key research areas
| Health policy evaluation and economic outcomes We examine how child's health interventions (universal toddler health programmes, antibiotics, maternity ward openings) affect economic outcomes decades later and across multiple generations. We evaluate public health policies (Denmark's fat tax, COVID-19 lockdown policies, and screening programmes), the impact of epidemics on survival and employment, and study the relationship between population ageing and healthcare costs across Europe. |
| Healthcare systems and economic inequalities We quantify socioeconomic inequalities in health and healthcare utilisation within universal healthcare systemsand integrate social risk factors into health economics models. We study healthcare delivery efficiency including hospital economies of scale, coordination mechanisms, and digital health technologies. We investigate healthcare utilisation patterns, including gender and socio-economic differences in response to health shocks, household responses to medical innovations, and the economic burden of chronic conditions. |
Who works on this
| Christian Møller Dahl Professor |
Applies machine learning to digitised historical records, and works on time series econometrics, quantile regression and causal inference. |
| Jørgen T. Lauridsen Professor |
Works on health econometrics and spatial econometrics, studying social and geographic inequality in health and health-care use. |
| Giovanni Mellace Professor |
Develops methods for identifying and estimating causal effects, much of it on instrumental variables, and applies them in empirical labour and health economics. |
| Christian Kronborg Associate Professor |
Costs the interventions that clinical trials test, in cardiology, psychiatry and public health. |
| Volha Lazuka Associate Professor |
Studies the long-run effects of health and social policies on health, earnings and mortality across the life course. |
| Seetha Menon Associate Professor |
Studies how health shocks, job insecurity and domestic violence affect health, with a focus on gender differences |
| Torben Skov Dyg Johansen Assistant Professor |
Works on machine learning for digitising historical records and on causal methods for allocating an intervention when capacity is limited. |
Grants in this area
| Project | Funder | Period | Grant recipient |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finding Better Policies to Help Children with Special Needs Thrive in School and Beyond Examines how placement in special education affects children with special needs, both while they are at school and over the decade after they leave it. The work runs with the children and youth administration of Odense Municipality, which supplies the administrative records. Innovation Fund Denmark funds the doctoral component, held by Marco Knudsen |
Carlsberg Foundation · Innovation Fund Denmark | 2025–2028 | Volha Lazuka 744,308 DKK |
|
Long-term Social Change through Normalization Reforms Targeting People with Disabilities and their Peers |
DFF Sapere Aude | 2025–2029 | Volha Lazuka 6.2M DKK |
|
Beyond the Paycheck: Insights into the Effect of Unemployment, Organisational Change, and Job Security on Mental Health |
Carlsberg Foundation | 2024-2027 | Seetha Menon 4.57M DKK |
| Do men and women react differently to an adverse health shock? Gender Differences in Healthcare Utilization and Health Behaviour Uses unexpected cardiovascular events in the Danish registers as a shock to health, and compares how men and women change theiruse of health care afterwards. The question is how much of the gap between women's longer lives and their worse health at older ages runs through care seeking and health behaviour. |
DFF | 2023-2025 | Seetha Menon 2.35M DKK |
| Causal Inference with Multiple IVs: Using Mendelian Randomization to Estimate the Causal Effects of Cannabis and Alcohol on Labour Productivity and of Creativity and Risk Taking on Entrepreneurship Develops instrumental variable methods for settings with several instruments, and applies them with genetic variants as instruments in the IPSYCH cohort. The two applications estimate the effects of cannabis and alcohol consumption on schooling, earnings and health, and the effects of creativity and risktolerance on entering entrepreneurship. |
DFF | 2019-2025 | Giovanni Mellace 4.77M DKK |
| SHARE: Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe – Danish participation and the REGLINKSHAREDK infrastructure Runs the Danish arm of a European panel that interviews people aged 50 and over in 27 countries and Israel about health, work, family and income. The Danish interviews are linked to Statistics Denmark register data in REGLINK-SHAREDK, which researchers can use free of charge. |
Carlsberg Foundation and others | 2004- | Jørgen T. Lauridsen 5.0M DKK |
| A More Equal School: How the Abolishment of Half-Time Schooling in Rural Primary Schools in Sweden Affected Life Chances and Inequality Uses the staggered abolition of half-timeschooling in rural Swedish primary schools in the early twentieth century to estimate what additional classroom time was worth. Digitised birth records linked to censuses follow the affected cohorts into later life and into the next generation. |
Vetenskapsrådet | Christian Møller Dahl 362,559 DKK |
|
| Hjernesamlingen – BRIDGE Funds the Department of Economics' part in BRIDGE, the Odense research centre built around a Danish collection of roughly 9,500brains taken from psychiatric patients between1945 and 1982. The centre links the collection to the patient records that accompany it, so that diagnoses and their neurological correlates can be studied together. |
Region Syddanmark | Christian Møller Dahl 234,200 DKK |
Completed