Vahid Moghani is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Erasmus School of Economics and the Tinbergen Institute, where he obtained his PhD in 2024. He is a health economist who studies how economic circumstances, from the workplace to job loss, shape health, and how information and social environments shape the beliefs behind demand for care.
Job market paper
The Health Costs of Firms
Little is known about the contribution of firms to variation in workers' healthcare costs. I use linked Dutch employer-employee data and workers moving across firms to separate persistent worker and firm differences in health expenditure. Moving a worker to a firm with a fixed effect one standard deviation higher raises expected annual expenditure by 17.8%, and the top-bottom quintile gap in firm effects is comparable to expenditure gradients by income, wealth, and education. Over half of the dispersion is within industry. Moving to a firm with higher coworker expenditure increases use of pain medication, and exposure to high-effect firms predicts disability and mortality. These firms pay higher wages between industries but not within them. Because healthcare is collectively financed, firms impose a fiscal externality: they generate healthcare costs they do not fully bear.
Link to paper (pdf)
A companion paper characterizes what the mover-design event study coefficient identifies.
When Is the Mover-Design Event Study Coefficient a Place-Effect Share? (pdf)
CV
Download CV (pdf)
References
- Pilar GarcÃa-Gómez (Erasmus School of Economics, supervisor)
- Sonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick)
- Owen O'Donnell (Erasmus School of Economics)
- Aurélien Baillon (Emlyon business school)
Contact
Email: moghani@ese.eur.nl
Personal website: Vahid Moghani