Jonna Olsson

Publications

Integrated epi-econ assessment: quantitative theory (with Timo Boppart, Karl Harmenberg, John Hassler, and Per Krusell)
Quantitative Economics (2025) [Paper] [Link]

Singles, couples, and their labor supply: long-run trends and short-run fluctuations
AEJ: Macroeconomics (2025) [Paper] [Link]
(previously circulated as: Structural transformation of the labor market and the aggregate economy)

Subjective life expectancies, time preference heterogeneity and wealth inequality (with Richard Foltyn)
Quantitative Economics (2024) [Longer version of paper] [Link]

Labor supply when productivity keeps growing (with Timo Boppart and Per Krusell)
Review of Economic Dynamics (2023) [Link]

Integrated epi-econ assessment of vaccination (with Timo Boppart, Karl Harmenberg, and Per Krusell)
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2022) [Link]

Working papers

Health dynamics, life expectancy heterogeneity, and the racial gap in Social Security wealth (with Richard Foltyn) [Paper] [CEPR DP]
[Companion website]

Using biennial data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate age-dependent health dynamics and survival probabilities at annual frequency conditional on race, sex, self-reported health and other covariates. The estimates can be used to calculate heterogeneous life expectancies in the population. We show that the racial life expectancy gap remains large, even conditional on health, socioeconomic and marital status. Due to racial differences in health dynamics and mortality, married black men on average can expect to receive $6,400 (or 8%) less in Social Security benefits in present value terms. Using a rich life cycle model, we estimate that this corresponds to a welfare loss of about 4%, whereas black married women’s welfare loss is primarily driven not by their own shorter life expectancy but the shorter life expectancy of their husbands.

Who should work how much? (with Timo Boppart and Per Krusell) [Paper] [NBER WP] [CEPR DP]

A production efficiency perspective naturally leads to the prescription that more productive individuals should work more than less productive individuals. Yet, systematic differences in actual hours worked across high- and low-wage individuals are barely noticeable. We highlight that the insurance available to households is an important determinant behind this fact. Using a dynamic heterogeneous-agent model with insurance frictions, income effects calibrated to match aggregate hours across time and space, and financial frictions that deliver realistic wealth dispersion, we report stark effects of insurance: perfect insurance would raise aggregate labor productivity by 9.6 percent and decrease hours worked by 7.7 percent.

Policy writing 

Confronting epidemics: the need for epi-econ IAMs (with Timo Boppart, Karl Harmenberg, John Hassler, and Per Krusell) [Link]
[Prepared for the National Institute of Economic Research, Sweden, 2021]

We discuss what tools would be useful in confronting epidemics, especially from the perspective of economics. Our main proposal is for policymakers to employ “epi-econ IAMs”: explicit Integrated Assessment Models, where epidemiology is integrated with economics. These models are under rapid development, but arguably not yet quite ready for quantitative use.