Biography
Health, education, and working life are closely interconnected. Differences in health and health behaviours may be reflected in people’s educational choices, careers, income, and well-being even decades later. I study these relationships using economic methods, producing evidence on how health, individual characteristics, and socioeconomic status shape people’s opportunities in the labour market and society more broadly.
Research interests
My research focuses particularly on health economics and labour economics. I examine how health and health behaviours are associated with education, employment, earnings, and careers. For example, I have studied the links between smoking, personality, early-life health, and later socioeconomic outcomes.
I conduct empirical, policy-relevant research using large-scale longitudinal data from administrative registers and health studies. My research combines perspectives from economics, medicine, psychology, public health, and genetics. In recent years, I have expanded my research to the relationship between health and financial market behaviour through the Health, Risk Aversion, and Financial Market Behavior (HERA) project. The project examines, for example, how the onset of a serious illness is associated with investment behaviour.
I have published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in journals spanning economics, public health, and medicine. My research has been published in journals including Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, Economics & Human Biology, Preventive Medicine, Journal of Economic Psychology, Demography, and PLOS ONE.
I am a Professor of Economics and Head of Economics at JSBE. I am also a co-chair of JYU.Well, the University of Jyväskylä’s interdisciplinary community of well-being researchers, and I represent Finland on the Health Economics and Outcomes Research Working Group of the 1+ Million Genomes (1+MG) initiative.
My areas of expertise include health and labour economics, health inequalities, health behaviour, labour market outcomes, health spillover effects within families, and the use of large-scale register and longitudinal data. I welcome opportunities to collaborate with research institutes, public-sector organisations, and other partners on projects related to population health, well-being, and labour markets. Please feel free to contact me at jutta.i.viinikainen@jyu.fi
Tutkimukseni käsittelevät terveyden, terveyskäyttäytymisen ja persoonallisuuden merkitystä työmarkkinoilla. Tutkimukseni tuottaa tietoa tiedeyhteisölle ja päätöksentekijöille siitä, mitkä tekijät vaikuttavat yksilön menestymiseen työmarkkinoilla.
