Life expectancy differs substantially across income groups, but mortality reveals little about when and how underlying health inequalities emerge. Using population-wide Dutch panel data linking income to detailed histories of diagnosed chronic conditions, we construct a mortality-weighted index that summarizes individual-level chronic-condition profiles on a common scale. We then use this index to study when and how health inequality forms over the lifecycle. About half of the old-age difference in chronic disease burden across the income distribution is already present by age 40, while the mortality differences that drive differences in life expectancy emerge decades later. Differential accumulation of chronic conditions accounts for 58 percent of the gap, with diabetes and cardiovascular disease being the main sources of divergence through midlife. The remaining 42 percent reflects income sorting by health. Mental health conditions play the largest role in sorting early in the lifecycle, and poor health is disproportionately associated with movements into the bottom of the income distribution.

This project links population-wide Dutch administrative records to high-resolution measures of pollution, food environments, green space, walkability, and healthcare access. A continuous-treatment event-study design follows 2.2 million people moving across neighbourhoods to distinguish dynamic place effects from sorting and reverse causation.

A multidisciplinary study linking Dutch cancer-registry data with treatment, income, and mortality records to examine socioeconomic differences in cancer incidence, stage at diagnosis, treatment, and survival.

Using population-wide Dutch administrative data, this project measures mental-health inequality and investigates social causation and social drift. It studies when income gaps in mental health emerge and how mental-health shocks affect earnings and employment.