Ingrid van Dijk receives ERC Starting Grant

Ingrid van Dijk, Associate senior lecturer at the Department of Economic History at LUSEM and researcher at the Centre for Economic Demography at Lund University, receives an ERC Starting Grant. Her project is titled “Relative Health: Long-Run Inequalities in Health and Survival Between Families and Across Generations”. 

Read more here.

Excerpt from the project abstract

Worldwide life expectancy has increased strongly over the past decades, but social inequalities in health and mortality are large and increasing. In contrast to trends in socioeconomic inequality and social mobility, long-term developments in inequality in health and mortality have been poorly documented. The project “Relative Health” aims to quantify the level of inequality in health and mortality from a family perspective 1800-today.  

The project has four main objectives:

• Develop new ways to measure inequality in health and mortality using a revolutionary new perspective, inequality between families and intergenerational persistence.

• Describe for the first time long-term trends in health and mortality inequality

• Identify mechanisms that shape these inequalities between families and across generations.

• Identify the role of contextual characteristics in shaping inequalities between families, including the level of social mobility and social inequality. 

State-of-the-art population reconstructions cover up to 9 generations of relatives (grandparents, parents, children) in Sweden, Netherlands, and US 1800-today and contain lifespan and health information. The project lays the groundwork to generalise these estimates of family health inequality to many contexts with less abundant data sources, using survey data. These contain indicators of health and mortality for focal individuals, their siblings and children for a range of low- and middle-income countries covering four decades. Overall, the project seeks to transform our understanding of social inequality in health and mortality across time and space.