Essays in Population Health

Since the early 21st century, concerns about widening inequalities in social and economic outcomes have come to dominate academic and political debates. As noted by van Raalte et al. (2018), the first and most fundamental form of inequality is inequality in lifespan as all other types of inequality are conditional on being alive. Studying and tackling the root causes of mortality inequalities is thus key for unveiling, analysing and addressing socio-economic disparities along other dimensions. Moreover, besides being troubling per se, mortality inequalities have also profound implications when it comes to the set-up of key policy programs ranging from public healthcare to social security systems. Building on these insights, in this thesis I investigate how mortality inequalities are shaped by lifecourse socio-economic circumstances and by exogenous demographic shocks. The thesis is articulated in four chapters sharing the same empirical context, i.e. Italy, and characterized by extensive reliance on administrative data. The first three chapters, based on data extracted from the digital archives of the Italian Social Security Institute (INPS), provide novel evidence about mortality inequalities arising from employment trajectories, occupational background and socio-economic status among the adult and elderly population in Italy, and about their policy implications for the public pension system. The last chapter, which builds upon a compendium of data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) including newly digitized archival sources, investigates and compares spatial inequalities in the mortality impact of major influenza outbreaks since the early 1950s up to the COVID-19 pandemic at the subnational level in Italy.