Projects
Globalisation, Innovation and Population Health: The health impacts of economic changes to the labour market
This project aims to draw a detailed picture of how important economic trends such as globalisation and technological change have shaped public health over the past decades, in particular through the ways they have affected the labour market. These broad economic forces have changed the way that people work, shifting the occupational health hazards faced by the workforce. This project will explore how these shifts in the economy and the labour market have affected population health and how individuals’ behaviours have changed in response. By combining a variety of data sources on health information, working conditions, and health-related behaviours, and using structural modelling techniques, we will describe how individuals make decisions about their occupation over the course of a lifetime, the ways in which health has been affected by these factors, and how this relates to other determinants of changing population health.
Project Participants:
Christian Dustmann (University College London)
Courtney Brell (University College London)
Globalisation and the Spread of Diseases
This project aims to draw a detailed picture of how important economic trends such as globalisation are affecting population health. The increasingly global economy has led to greater transmissibility of diseases around the world, with direct consequences for public health. The project will explore how increased trade and mobility between countries has allowed for increased transmission of diseases, and will focus on an especially critical health issue: bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The WHO considers this to be the next and most important health issue worldwide. This project will combine data on health, antibiotic resistance and economic indicators at the country level over many years. It will develop a multi-country model to evaluate the economic and health consequences of the spread of antibiotic resistance, and to determine how efficient policies can be implemented.
Integrated Labor Markets, Cross-Border Workers, and Wage Equalization
Economic theory suggests that unrestricted cross-border labour mobility could lead to migration flows and wage equalisation within labour markets. However, persistent wage differentials are observed in several integrated labour markets across regions, contributing significantly to the rise of cross-border workers. This trend is increasingly relevant in the European labor market, with recent estimates indicating about 1.4 million cross-border workers in the European Union’s workforce. This project aims to explore the reasons behind the presence of perpetual disparities in wages and working conditions in integrated border regions and to understand the factors driving cross-border workers’ decisions to live in one country while working in another. We first develop a new theoretical model to capture the dynamics of worker and firm behavior across two countries. We then empirically assess the factors that explain the observed patterns by examining detailed administrative data on workers and firms in the labor market between Switzerland and Italy, particularly focusing on the region of Ticino.
Project Participants:
Christian Dustmann (University College London)
