This month, alumnus Jiaxin Shi has received the Otto Hahn Medal for his doctoral thesis, entitled "Mortality Inequality and Its Implications for Retirees".
The Medal is awarded by the Max Planck Society to young scientists for outstanding scientific achievements.
Jiaxin's dissertation explored how well findings from sophisticated measures of mortality inequality by socioeconomic status match baseline evidence based on simpler measures of inequality, such as life expectancy differences.
The paper was ground-breaking in showing that traditional measures of inequalities are biased and overly reliant on average outcomes. Its main findings were:
- To link the sociological concept of stratification to age-at-death distributions, showing that these distributions are increasingly non-overlapping across income quintiles, even during periods of converging life expectancy.
- Demonstrating that the length of life spent in retirement is more equal across educational groups when actual retirement behaviour and re-entry dynamics are taken into account.
- Mortality inequalities, which lead to differences in the length of pension receipt across social groups, contribute to a substantial part of the overall lifetime pension inequality, even when pensions are assumed to be progressive.
In his thesis, Jiaxin presented four studies on mortality inequality that advance the knowledge of how life expectancy differs across social groups and the implications for retirees.
The results of his work show that the greater longevity of socially advantaged groups accounts for up to a quarter of lifetime pensions.
Jiaxin said:
I am thrilled and honoured to receive this year’s Otto Hahn Medal. This is recognition of not only myself but also my advisors and collaborators, who have taught me how to do research, and have kept inspiring and supporting me.
Jiaxin was a student at the Department of Sociology from 2020 to 2023, and was also a member of the Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science. His DPhil dissertation was supervised by Oxford's Christiaan Monden and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research's Alyson van Raalte.
He is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Congratulations, Jiaxin!
