Anne-Line Koch Helsø defends her PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate

Anne-Line Koch Helsø

Title

“Labor Supply and Earnings: In old age, in bad health, and across generations” .

Time and venue

10 December 2018 at 13:00. University of Copenhagen, Centre for Health and Society, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K, building 26, room 26.2.21.

Assessment committee

Professor Carl-Johan Lars Dalgaard, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chairman)
Professor Nabanita Datta Gupta, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Professor Espen Bratberg, University of Bergen, Norway

Abstract

The three chapters of this dissertation all revolve around the labor supply and earnings of individuals

In Chapter 1, we study the labor supply decision of seniors, and how financial incentives affect their retirement decisions. We propose and estimate a novel structural retirement model with leisure preference heterogeneity. We study the extent to which larger private retirement savings dampens the effect of retirement reforms that target an increase in labor supply. Our findings suggest that the effect of raising the normal retirement age by one year is more than halved for individuals who hold private retirement savings equivalent to at least four years of earnings.

Chapter 2 studies the labor supply and earnings costs of hospitalizations and evaluate the quality of treatment based on its ability to mitigate the labor market consequences of a given diagnosis. We measure a four percentage points difference in lost earnings between the best and worst hospital, all else equal. We also document a significant decline in the labor cost of hospitalizations over time and find that the average post-hospitalization reduction in labor supply has declined by 13.6 percentage points from 1998 to 2012.

In Chapter 3, I present a novel cross-country comparison of intergenerational income mobility in Denmark and the U.S. Unlike existing studies, I rely on high-quality administrative data for both countries. I find that Denmark is 50-100% more mobile than the U.S. I contrast my findings to the existing literature, which finds larger cross-country differences, and show that my results are more robust to sample selection and measurement error biases.