Maarit Olkkola
Researcher, VATT Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki, Finland
I am an Economist working in the fields of Labor and Health Economics, as well as Economic History. My main research interest is the effect of public policy on the formation of skills and preferences, including the interaction between childhood health and human capital formation. My current research focuses, for example, on the impacts of public health policies on health, education, and labor market outcomes.
Current positions:
Researcher, VATT Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki, Finland
Economics PhD student, Aalto University & the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics
Research fields:
Labor Economics, Health Economics, Economic History
Contact information:
maarit.olkkola(at)vatt.fi
Education:
2024 (expected) PhD in Economics, Aalto University
2016 Master in Economics and Finance,
Barcelona School of Economics
2015 Master of Social Sciences (Economic and Social History), University of Helsinki
Publications
Mass Vaccination and Educational Attainment: Evidence from the 1967–68 Measles Eradication Campaign
Journal of Health Economics, Volume 92, 2023, 102828
joint work with: Philipp Barteska, Sonja Dobkowitz, and Michael Rieser
Previous versions of this paper include our Master's thesis at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a working paper circulated as "Vaccine-preventable Childhood Disease and Adult Human Capital: Evidence from the 1967 Measles Eradication Campaign in the United States".
We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased.
Work in progress
Public Policy and the Child Mortality Transition [draft available upon request]
Abstract: I examine the introduction of a public policy that coincided with a large reduction in child mortality: the rollout of universal child health centers to every municipality in Finland in the 1940s. The centers offered regular child health counseling visits for children under school age both on-site and at home. I use newly collected individual-level child mortality data to estimate the causal effects of the reform on child mortality at different ages. For children between the ages one month to one year that were the most intensively targeted by the policy, I find that access to rural child health centers reduced postneonatal mortality by 8.6 deaths per thousand live births (27 percent of baseline mortality in the age range one month to one year). This figure corresponds to approximately half of the overall decline in postneonatal mortality in Finland 1945–1950 or to about a fourth of the overall decline in the mortality of children under age five. For child deaths in the age range one to four, my estimates are also consistent with a similarly large decline in mortality, but they are not statistically significant.
Long-run Impacts of Universal Child Health Care
Aim: I estimate the causal impacts of the introduction of primary health care for children on adult outcomes. Universal child health centers were rolled-out in Finnish municipalities in the 1940s. Thus, free-of-charge well-child visits with a public health nurse both at health centers and at home became available in the countryside, where almost a third of the municipalities lacked any physicians. I use administrative and census data for Finnish cohorts born 1930-1950 in a dynamic difference-in-differences design to estimate the impacts of the child health center policy on adult educational attainment and labor market outcomes..
Intergenerational effects of forced migration (with Elias Dinas, Dominik Hangartner, llona Lahdelma & Matti Sarvimäki)