DONDENA Seminar - Michael Kuhn
“Explaining the increasing inequality in life expectancy across income groups”
SPEAKER: Michael Kuhn (IIASA)
ABSTRACT:
We present a novel life-cycle model, grounded in demographic principles, to examine the influence of medical progress, technological progress, and the reduction in age-independent mortality on the rise in life expectancy across socioeconomic groups. Our findings indicate that the expanding disparity in life expectancy across income groups, as well as the growing income inequality among educational groups in the US, can be attributed to a selection process that changes the composition of the initial characteristics (learning ability, schooling effort, and health frailty) of the income groups. This selection process is triggered by the rising income and medical advancements that emerged with the cardiovascular revolution in the 1970s.
BIO:
Michael Kuhn (PhD, University of Rostock, D) is the Program Director of the newly (2021) established IIASA Economic Frontiers (EF) Program. He is affiliated with the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, as well as with the Vienna Institute of Demography. His research interests lie in the areas of theoretical and applied health, population, development and more recently environmental and climate economics and its interface with mathematics, demography and medicine. He has published widely, inter alia, in the Economic Journal, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, Annual Review of Economcis, Journal of Economic Theory, Lancet Planetary Health, JAMA Oncology, Health Affairs, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications and Theoretical Population Biology. He is a co-opted member of the field committees on ''Health Economics” and ''Population Economics'' of the German Economic Association, and associate editor of the “Journal of the Economics of Ageing”.
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