Nikolaos Prodromidis

About Me

Welcome to my personal website. I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and my research focuses on topics at the intersection of health and labor economics.

In my dissertation, I analyze significant historical events from the early welfare state in Sweden, including the reform establishing the 8-hour workday, major labor strikes, and the expansion of the healthcare sector, along with their consequences. Using early 20th-century Sweden as a case study, I combine high-quality administrative data with quasi-experimental econometric methods to address policy-relevant questions.

My CV is linked here.

To contact me, my email is: nikolaos.prodromidis@uni-due.de

Research

Working Papers

Working hours and workers’ health: Evidence from a national experiment in Sweden
Abstract:Despite the importance of regulating working hours for workers’ physical and mental health and maintaining labour productivity, the literature lacks credible causal estimates for the short- and particularly long-run. We provide new evidence for the causal effect of reduced working hours on mortality using full population register data, exploiting exogenous variation from a nationwide policy that Sweden implemented in 1920, reducing the working hours from 56 to 48 hours for about 1 in 4 salaried workers. Exploiting variation across occupations using difference-in-differences and event-study models, we show that lower working hours decreased mortality by around 15%, with effects primarily driven by reductions in heart diseases and workplace accidents, and increased longevity of affected workers by around 0.6 years. Causal forest estimators indicate particularly strong effects for older workers. Our results imply that many lives could be saved worldwide by reducing long working hours for labour-intensive occupations.

Work in Progress

The Long-Term Effects of Hospital Deliveries (with Martin Fischer, Martin Karlsson, Martin Lövdén, and Therese Nilsson)

Strikes, Social Contacts, and Pandemics

Published Papers

The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in Economic History. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance, 2022, with M. Karlsson and Daniel Kühnle.

Diabetes prevalence and its relationship with education, wealth, and BMI in 29 low-and middle-income countries. Diabetes Care, 2020, with JA Seiglie, ME Marcus, and C. Ebert.

Teaching

Instructor: Health Economics Seminar on Low and Middle Income Countries, WS 24/25

Teaching Assistant: Causality and Program Evaluation, SS 2024, SS 2023

TA: Health Economics I, WS 22/23

TA: Health Economics II, SS 22, SS 21, SS 20

TA: Health Economics Seminar (Master), WS 19/20, WS 20/21, WS 22/23

Curriculum Vitae

Download CV