Dear colleague,

join us for the upcoming MUES seminars. All seminars are conducted in English and are comprised of a 50-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute discussion session. These seminars are open to the public, and we warmly welcome spontaneous attendance. If you would like to have a bilateral conversation with any of our guests, join us for lunch, or attend the dinner with guests, please let us know in advance.

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MUES team

Research Seminar - Health Economics | 15 September - 2:00 PM | | Agata Foryciarz | Personal website | Stanford University School of Medicine

! CANCELLED ! Will tomorrow’s American retirees be healthier than their parents generation? Life-course epidemiology approaches for understanding and modeling changes in population health of US seniors

As more Americans reach older age, retirement and health care systems will need to adapt to support their needs. While it was long hoped that increases in life expectancy will translate to more disability-free years, and an ability to work longer, recent work suggests that many of today’s seniors will enter retirement at worse health and with fewer resources than their parents’ generation. Designing appropriate policy solutions requires 1) understanding the complex sources of this phenomenon and 2) ensuring that population health simulations appropriately model the effectiveness of potential interventions.

My work addresses both these aims by leveraging two social epidemiology frameworks: the life course theory, which considers how exposures accumulate across chronological life stages, and the ecosocial theory, which describes the mechanisms through which social stratification generates health inequities. I will present results from two projects: in the first, I examine employment status-specific declines in health and well-being of the middle-aged population across the income distribution over the last decade, to consider whether changes in the US labor market may be driving observed disparities. In the second, I propose extensions of the Future Adult Model that more closely align models disease processes with life course theory, by reducing the reliance of the Markov (memoryless) assumption.

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Agata Foryciarz is an interdisciplinary population health researcher and a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and the Stanford Center on Longevity. She completed a PhD in computer science with a focus on biostatistics at Stanford in 2025.

Internal Research Seminar - Economics | 16 September - 12:00 PM | P103 | Bronislava Adamjáková | Department of Public Economics

Explaining Non-Take-Up of Social Benefits: Individual Characteristics versus Country Context

Non-take-up (NTU) of social benefits is usually explained through barriers at the individual level, such as lack of information, stigma, or administrative burden. This study asks whether such household characteristics can account for differences in benefit take-up across countries, using harmonized EU-SILC 2022 data linked to EUROMOD microsimulation outputs reflecting the tax and benefit rules in place in 2021. Take-up of two benefit types is analyzed across European countries: housing- and family-related means-tested benefits, focusing on whether an eligible household claims the benefit at all. Firth penalized logistic regression is used to address convergence problems caused by very low variation in take-up in several countries, combining a broad set of household level predictors with country fixed effects. A McFadden pseudo R2 decomposition indicates that variation between countries accounts for roughly 60% of the explained variation in take-up for both benefit types, while household characteristics contribute comparatively little beyond this. Reported non-take-up of housing benefits is very high across most sampled countries; this may partly reflect genuine non-claiming behavior and partly known difficulties in simulating eligibility for housing benefits from survey data. Non-take-up of family benefits varies far more widely across countries, from around 5% to nearly 80%. The findings point to institutional and systemic factors, such as benefit design, administrative procedures, and national context, as the primary drivers of non-take-up, challenging accounts that locate the problem mainly in individual household behavior.

Upcoming webinars you do don’t want to miss:

Suggested seminar series:

Vienna: WU Seminar Series, CEU, University of Vienna

Prague: CERGE-EI, VSE Prague

International: IOS Regensburg, LSE Wellbeing Seminars (recordings), Markus' Academy webinar (youtube recordings)

Brno (irregular): FSS MUNI, PEF MENDELU

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