London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

This talk will focus on a paper that examines whether educational attainment affects the timing of cancer onset. We exploited Austria’s 1962 school reform—which increased compulsory schooling from eight to nine years—to estimate the causal effect of additional education on the age at first cancer diagnosis. 

Addressing this problem, we used a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, accelerated failure time models, and newly linked administrative data covering cancer, education, employment, and mortality for an entire birth cohort. We found that additional schooling delays cancer diagnoses among men, especially for cancers linked to smoking and diet. No effect is found for women or for cancers less associated with behavior. 

These findings offer new evidence on how education shapes not just health outcomes, but also the timing of health shocks – an underexplored dimension that may help explain persistent inequalities in health across the life course and healthy life years.

Speaker

Yuliya Kulikova

Yuliya Kulikova received her PhD from the International Doctorate in Economic Analysis, jointly organised by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Barcelona School of Economics, Spain, in 2016. She worked as a researcher at the Microeconomic Analysis Division of the Bank of Spain for five years and moved to the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Japan) in October 2021. In November 2021, she joined the IIASA Economic Frontiers Program as a part-time research scholar to work on economic problems related to equal life chances, COVID-19, and health.

In her research, Kulikova combines tools from Quantitative Macroeconomics and Applied Micro-econometrics to build structural models. She relies heavily on data to estimate these models, but also does purely empirical or purely modelling work. Her research interests include (i) social mobility and inequality, (ii) labor economics, (iii) family economics, (iv) health economics, and (v) the interaction between genomics and economics.

She has been involved in projects spanning a range of topics including the role of health in children’s human capital production and the intergenerational transmission of inequality; the labour market dynamics of households; the effect of family-friendly policies on fertility and the labour market outcomes of females; the role of assortative mating and selection into marriage on the health outcomes of spouses; and the dynamics of vaccination and the evolution of vaccine-resistant strains during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Her work has been published in the journals European Economic Review and Nature Scientific Reports.

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