Elin Ingrid Fanny Colmsjö defends her PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate:

Elin Ingrid Fanny Colmsjö, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Title:

Shifting Life-Trajectories: Wealth, Violence and Health

Supervisor:

• Søren Leth-Petersen, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Assessment Committee:

• Asger Lau Andersen, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
• Kathrin Schlafmann, Associate Professor, Department of Finance, Copenhagen Business School 
• Abigail Adams, Professor, Department of Economics, Northwestern University

Summary:

This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters studying how distinct events - shocks to wealth, violence, and health - shift individual life trajectories, using Danish administrative register data.

In the first chapter, I study how parental wealth transfers early in adulthood shape long-run wealth accumulation and business formation. Exploiting a Danish tax policy that allows parents to sell housing to their children below market value, I show that early access to wealth gives recipients a financial flying start: beyond mechanically raising housing wealth, transfers increase entrepreneurship and consumption. The effects are strongest among individuals with limited liquid resources and when parents have prior entrepreneurial experience, indicating that the timing of wealth transfers matters at critical stages of the life cycle.

In the second chapter, written together with Daphné Skandalis, we study exposure to violence at work and show that it leads to substantial and persistent earnings losses and higher job separation — effects markedly larger than those following comparably severe non-violent injuries. Affected workers move to safer firms, consistent with lower violence risk, consistent with deliberate risk avoidance. Because violent incidents are concentrated in jobs with high labor market tightness, they aggravate existing labor shortages.

In the third chapter, written together with Steffen Andersen, Kim Peijnenburg, and Gianpaolo Parise, we use the timing of cancer diagnoses to show that severe health shocks lead to a persistent increase in both first-time offenses and re-offending, driven by financial strain, shorter survival horizons, and psychological distress. Welfare policies that mitigate the economic consequences of health shocks substantially reduce these spillovers, showing that health shocks generate broader social externalities and are not purely private events.

An electronic copy of the dissertation can be requested here: lema@econ.ku.dk