Our common driver in this field of research is improving health and healthy behaviors across the life cycle: this extends from before birth and childhood, through the reproductive and productive years of life, into old age and across generations. Disparities emerge at an early age, and health is subsequently essential for education, productivity, and thus employment and income – and these health disparities are often transmitted from parents to children. These processes are influenced by individual behavior, health policies and government regulations, structural factors and institutions. The challenges of the future, such as pandemics, natural disasters, conflict, migration, and aging put further pressure on this and require an international and interdisciplinary perspective.
We seek to contribute to finding effective and affordable solutions by identifying causal links between behavior, interventions, and health; evaluating the “targeting” impact, and cost-effectiveness of health programs and policies; and conducting welfare analyses. Our research is strongly empirical in nature, based on econometric analyses of administrative data or large-scale household surveys, as well as behavioral experiments. An important emphasis in this cluster is on the “Global South”, where health systems are often less well developed, market failures are more prominent, disease burden is higher, and inequality is deeper.
We teach related courses at the Bachelors level (“Health Economics”, “Human Capital”), within the MSc Economics and Public Policy tracks (“Economics of the Welfare State”, “Micro for Development”, “Human Development”), as well at the MPhil program of the Tinbergen Institute (“Health Economics”, “Development Economics”).