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I work at the Ministry of Finance where I, for example, use research and data to conduct ex-ante policy evaluations on structural policy questions. I mainly focus on questions related to education policy and social security.
I received my PhD in Economics from Aalto University School of Business in September 2026.
You can find my CV here.
Contact: juuso.p.makinen@aalto.fi, LinkedIn
Work in progress
Family taxation and labor supply
Working paper: Helsinki GSE (5/2026)
I study a tax policy in Finland in 1976 that changed the basis for income taxation from couple's joint income to individual income. With this shift from family to individual taxation, secondary earners within households experienced large drops in their participation tax rates and marginal tax rates. Because most of these secondary earners were women, the reform leveled gender differences in labor market opportunities. I find that the reform-induced changes in participation tax rates contributed to the rise in women's employment over the 1970s: The policy encouraged around 7,800 women to participate in the labor market, increasing married women's employment rate by 1.7 percentage points. The effects correspond to an average participation elasticity of 0.17. The increases in employment were driven by women with compulsory education and mothers with school-age children. For mothers, the participation elasticities range from zero to 0.3 depending on the age of the youngest child. Finally, I show that the shift from family to individual income taxation influenced within-household income shares among self-employed couples, generating bunching at 0.5 in the share distribution.
Life-cycle effects of public childcare: Evidence on children and their parents, with Mikko Silliman
Working paper: Helsinki GSE (12/2025); RF-Berlin (1/2026)
Research summary: RF-Berlin Insights
This paper provides large-scale evidence linking the economic effects of childcare programs to social skills measured in adulthood. We examine Finland's first national public childcare program, and document that it increased parental labor supply - through retirement - while reducing the intergenerational persistence of income. Critically, we leverage Finnish Defence Forces data on the near population of males to show that effects on children's adult income are underlied by lasting effects on social skills. Further, we show that life-cycle cost-effectiveness estimates based on the assumption of constant effects after typical observation windows can considerably overestimate the net costs of public childcare.
Other
Introductory chapter to the dissertation "Essays on labor supply and public policy"
Doctoral thesis, 2026
This introductory chapter connects the essays to a larger context. First, I introduce basic labor supply frameworks that help identify potential mechanisms that steer participation and career decisions. I complement the basic conceptual ideas with empirical evidence on what mechanisms are quantitatively important in explaining women’s labor market outcomes. In doing this, I highlight mechanisms relevant for the policies that I study in this dissertation. Second, I present evidence on how public policies have contributed to the rise in women’s employment over the past several decades, situating the policies I study within a broader set of policies that have shaped women’s employment decisions. I also introduce evidence on the effects of childcare on children, which answers whether there is a tradeoff between higher parental employment and children’s long-term outcomes. Third, I provide historical background on women’s changing roles in society to contextualize the period in which the reforms took place. Fourth, I introduce the empirical methods I utilize in estimating causal effects of the two policies. Finally, I present short summaries of the essays.
Population responses to local labor demand shifts: Evidence from the collapse of Finnish-Soviet trade
Master's thesis, 2016
I study how regional populations respond to local labor demand shifts by quantifying how the collapse of Finnish-Soviet trade in early 1990s affected regional working-age populations in Finland. I identify local labor demand shifts by using regional variation in the production of goods that were exported from Finland to Soviet Union. I find that the more local employment focused on the production of Soviet exported goods, the more region’s share of total working-age population decreased in response to the shock. The demand shifts affected regions' demographic compositions as the reductions were driven by young and more educated people. The findings suggest that regional population responses contribute to equilibrating local labor markets after asymmetric labor demand shocks.
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