Behavioural Responses to Health Innovations and the Consequences for Socioeconomic Outcomes

Description: Inequality in health has been increasing in recent decades. Despite increasing healthcare costs and increased awareness of disease prevention, the benefits of new and better treatments in health are unevenly distributed. A prevailing explanation is that people with higher incomes and better education more rapidly adopt new health technologies than others. New health technologies thus benefit more well-educated people and thus increase inequality in health. This poses an urgent challenge to society.

The project aims to answer the following questions:

1. How do innovations in healthcare transform into socioeconomic effects?
2. How do innovations in healthcare and patient behaviour affect inequality in mortality across income groups?
3. Which mechanisms can explain the observed link between education and health?

Team
All team members mentioned below are employed at Department of Economics at University of Copenhagen and members of Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI) at the university. The project will recruit a number of post docs in 2019.
The project cooperates with several internation researchers including professor Jonathan Skinner, Dartmouth College, associate professor Stephanie Schurer, University of Sydney, and assistant professor Itzik Fadlon, University of California San Diego