Welcome!
Welcome!
Embedded Files
I am an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. My research is centered around finance and health. I study how financial shocks affect households' and employees' health, and how health shocks impact household finances. I am also interested in the economics of family businesses and entrepreneurship.
Email: karpati (at) ese.eur.nl
Working papers
Working papers
Maternity Benefits for Female Entrepreneurs: Effects on Business Outcomes and Family Health (with Fabrizio Core) (UPDATED October 2025)
(previously circulated as: Self-Employed Mothers: Child Penalties, Maternity Benefits, and Family Health)
WEFI seminar series ⋅ IDB-ERBD-We-Fi Research Conference ⋅ INSEAD-Doriot Conference ⋅ Netspar Pension Day ⋅ HUN-REN CERS – Institute of Economics
We study the effects of motherhood and maternity benefits on small-scale female entrepreneurs. Using administrative microdata from the Netherlands, we document that childbirth reduces revenues by 26% in the quarter of birth and 12% in the long run. We then study the introduction of an unconditional maternity cash benefit. Exploiting eligibility by birth month, we find that eligible mothers reduce their business revenues further, but only in the first two years after childbirth, with no long-run effects. Reliance on formal daycare decreases, suggesting that eligible mothers spend more time with their child, leading to improvements in children’s health.
How does Life Expectancy Affect Wealth Accumulation and Labor Supply? Evidence from Genetic Testing (UPDATED July 2025)
(previously circulated as: Household Finance under the Shadow of Cancer)
R&R American Economic Review
EFA 2023 ⋅ FIRS PhD session ⋅ Paris December Finance ⋅ FMA ⋅ European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society ⋅ SAFE Household Finance Workshop⋅ Young Economist Symposium 2022 Yale ⋅ Annual Meeting of the German Finance Association
Abstract: Life expectancy plays a key role in economic models of wealth accumulation, with important implications for economic growth. Empirically, the effects of life expectancy are hard to identify, since a lower life expectancy is typically correlated with bad current health. I overcome this challenge by exploiting genetic testing as an information shock to life expectancy. My sample consists of working-age adults who start their life with a 50% probability of having inherited a gene mutation causing Lynch syndrome (LS), a hereditary cancer syndrome. They undergo genetic testing to learn their mutation carrier status while they are still healthy. Conditional on the ex-ante probability of carrying the LS gene mutation, the result of genetic testing is independent of potential outcomes. To identify the causal effects of life expectancy, I estimate the differences in outcomes following genetic testing between people who test positive (mutation carriers) and those who test negative (non-carriers) using detailed administrative data. I find that life expectancy has a positive effect on financial wealth accumulation among working-age adults, in large part due to a positive effect on labor supply and household income. Other less-liquid wealth elements such as housing wealth are unaffected. Using a baseline of untested individuals, I also find that increases and decreases in life expectancy lead to opposite-signed effects on financial wealth accumulation.
The Economic Value of Eliminating Diseases (with Julio Crego, Jens Kvaerner and Luc Renneboog)
EEA 2023 ⋅ Spanish Finance Forum ⋅ Tilburg University ⋅ ODISSEI/Statistics Netherlands
Abstract: We estimate the causal effects of 334 different types of health shocks on medical expenses, mortality, disability, labor market participation, labor earnings, and the need for nursing home care using detailed data on 6.9 million people diagnosed by medical specialists between 2013 and 2017. We quantify the benefits of eliminating diseases with distinct consequences for people of different social strata by incorporating the estimates into a standard life-cycle model. Our results reveal substantial heterogeneity in welfare gains by types of disease for different people. We discuss the potential implications of our results for the financing of medical research.
Download our Matlab application that displays the estimated effects of each diagnosis, and the interconnectedness of diagnoses here. Requires MATLAB Runtime(R2023b).
PUblications
PUblications
Corporate Financing Frictions and Employee Mental Health (with Luc Renneboog)
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
This paper argues that corporate financial frictions can have an adverse effect on employee mental health, an important determinant of employee productivity. To identify the causal effects of financial frictions, we exploit variation in firms’ need to refinance their long-term debt in 2008, a period when refinancing became more difficult due to the credit crunch. Using administrative microdata, we find that antidepressant use grows significantly more among employees of firms in higher need of debt refinancing. Much of this effect occurs at employees keeping their jobs, pointing to decreased perceptions of job security as a transmission channel.
Individuals with Lynch syndrome have similar survival as the general population, but lower than family members without Lynch syndrome (with Maartje Nielsen, Anja Wagner, Sanne W. Bajwa-ten Broeke, Fonnet E. Bleeker, and Monique E. van Leerdam)
Gastroenterology (Research Letter)
The Family Firm A Synthesis, Stylized Facts, and Future Research Directions (with Jeroen Verbouw and Luc Renneboog)
Annals of Corporate Governance
In acknowledging and exploiting the substantial heterogeneity between family firms, scholars are increasingly stepping away from the dichotomization of family influence to better understand critical nuances that explain how, why, and when family firms differ from their nonfamily counterparts. For the sample of privately-held family firms, this study also pushes the literature further and argues that various sources of heterogeneity might be correlated and that not taking this into account sustains empirical indeterminacies and limits theoretical advancement. We, therefore, take on a family-level perspective and show how heterogeneous family values interact with more traditional factors that have received ample scholarly attention such as succession, firm strategies, ownership and governance, and financial policies. Specifically, we present an extensive synthesis of the recent and topical literature on each topic and then provide stylized facts on intercorrelations between sources of family firm heterogeneity based on survey data on over 900 family firms. Lastly, we delineate a detailed research agenda to push the field forward.
E-MAIl: karpati (at) ese.eur.nl
ADDRESS: Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3062 PA Rotterdam, the Netherlands
E-MAIl: karpati (at) ese.eur.nl
ADDRESS: Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3062 PA Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse