Laboratory

Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health (MaxHel)

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Methods

Conducted by Mikko Myrskylä; Christian Dudel, Aapo Hiilamo, Pekka Martikainen, Megan Evans

Detailed Description

Research conducted in the MaxHel Center is supported by advanced methodological tools from several disciplines, including demography, statistics, and genetics research. The Center’s knowledge of these tools is based partially on our in-house expertise and partially on expertise that we can leverage from our institutional and individual collaboration partners. The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Helsinki Institute for Demography & Population Health have an extensive knowledge base on demographic and statistical methods.

The Center also focuses on advancing research methods at the intersection of demographic techniques, causal inference, and genetic epidemiology. This intersection is at the core of where important advances in research on social inequalities in health could be made. A key tool of demographic analysis, the multistate life table, is used mainly as a descriptive method in current research. It is not widely adopted beyond demography and allied fields, even though it has the potential to provide many innovative measures for examining life courses. Attempts to incorporate causal thinking, or the so-called counterfactual causal revolution, into multistate life table analysis have been limited. Moreover, life table techniques and genetic data have not been previously integrated, and the possibility of combining machine learning techniques with these methods to deal with population heterogeneity has rarely been explored. We advance research on all these topics.

Our methods research is embedded in an extraordinary data infrastructure that includes detailed generational and kin linkages, genetic information, quasi-natural experiments, longitudinal data spanning over half a century, and virtually no attrition or loss to follow-up. This context allows us to combine the best of both worlds in terms of description (we observe the full population over time, not a sample or a cross-section) and causal inference (we can simultaneously explore various fixed effects, instrumental variables, and genetic designs).

Publications

Hiilamo, A.; Fugletveit , R.; Pitkänen, J.; Moretti, M.; Martikainen, P.; Hermansen, Å.; Myrskylä, M.:

Children´s out-of-home care across Finnish and Norwegian regions: lifetime risks, expected length, and care leaving routes for synthetic cohorts

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2026-001. (2026)    

Hiilamo, A.; Hermansen, Å.:

Financial strain in Norway: the lifetime risk of and expected time spent in payment problems

International Journal of Social Welfare 35:1, e70053–e70053. (2026)    

Hiilamo, A.; Hermansen, Å.:

Financial strain in Norway: the lifetime risk of and expected time spent in payment problems

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2025-006. (2025)    

Hiilamo, A.; Pitkänen, J.; Moretti, M.; Martikainen, P.; Myrskylä, M.:

Children's out-of-home care in Finland, 1993–2020: lifetime risks, expectancies, exit routes, and number of placements for synthetic cohorts

Child Abuse and Neglect 169:1, 1–10. (2025)    

Moretti, M.; Korhonen, K.; van Raalte, A. A.; Riffe, T.; Martikainen, P.:

Evolution of widowhood lifespan and its gender and educational inequalities in Finland over three decades

Demography 62:5, 1635–1660. (2025)    

Moretti, M.; Korhonen, K.; van Raalte, A. A.; Riffe, T.; Martikainen, P.:

Evolution of widowhood lifespan and its gender and educational inequalities in Finland over three decades

SocArXiv papers. unpublished. (2025)