Jeroen van der Vaart wins Netspar Thesis Award 2024

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) proudly announces that Jeroen van der Vaart has won the Netspar thesis award for his PhD thesis, ‘Health Risks in Old Age: Implications for Household Savings and Insurance’. Each year, Netspar, the Dutch Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement, awards two prizes to exceptional Msc and PhD theses on aging and financing retirement.

Van der Vaart recently obtained his PhD at FEB, where he now works as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher. His PhD is supervised by promotor professor Rob Alessie and daily supervisors dr. Max Groneck and dr. Raun van Ooijen.

Health risks in old age

In his thesis, Van der Vaart studied heterogeneity in long-term care and mortality risks, as well as their implications for public and private insurance. Using Dutch administrative data, he examined factors affecting the duration of and transitions between formal long-term care use types (home-based care or institutional care). Compared to having a cognitive impairment, he found that a physical impairment relates to shorter long-term care periods and a more important role for informal care in reducing long-term care use. Additionally, higher financial resources and homeownership delay long-term care use, indicating a potential demand for private long-term care options.

Van der Vaart also studied adverse selection within private annuity- and long-term care insurance markets. Although combining these insurances can mitigate selection problems when the risks of survival and long-term care are negatively correlated, his findings indicate that this is insufficient to address selection problems fully. Furthermore, Van der Vaart examined to what extent socioeconomic differences in long-term care and mortality shape the welfare distribution in the Netherlands. He found that households with higher socioeconomic status experience higher welfare than those with lower socioeconomic status because they receive pensions for a longer period, have shorter nursing home stays, and can leave larger bequests. In the final chapter, which is joint work with FEB professor Gerard van den Berg, Van der Vaart develops the econometric framework for his analyses: a duration model for truncated data with unobserved heterogeneity.

Fostering collaborative research

Van der Vaart received the award, along with a cash prize of € 3,000 during the Netspar Pension Day in ‘het Jaarbeursgebouw’ in Utrecht. The researcher thanked Netspar for their continuous support and for fostering such a welcoming and collaborative environment for researchers in pensions, aging, and retirement. “I would like to thank Netspar for everything they have done for me over the past six years, which means a great deal to me. A special thanks also goes to my PhD supervisors, Rob Alessie, Raun van Ooijen, and Max Groneck, as well as my alma mater, the University of Groningen, and FEB in particular.”

Questions? Please contact  Jeroen van der Vaart. His thesis can be found here.