June 07, 2023 | News

Congratulations Jiaxin Shi

Jenn Dowd (examiner, University of Oxford), Jiaxin Shi, Collin Payne (examiner, Australian National University), and Christiaan Monden (supervisor, University Oxford). © private

On June 7th, Jiaxin Shi successfully defended his dissertation on “Mortality Inequality and Its Implications for Retirees” and obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford.

In his thesis Jiaxin presented four studies on mortality inequality which advance the knowledge of how lifespans differ 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 one quarter of lifetime pension.

“The thesis was outstanding. It contained a unique mixture of papers at the frontier of methodological development, data quality assessment, and careful empirical work. Together these showed that inequalities in mortality and retirement are not always well captured by simple averages, and that mortality inequalities are a key component to wealth inequalities. The jury was so impressed, that he doesn’t even need to do any post-viva corrections, which is quite a feat at Oxford,” says Alyson van Raalte (Research Group Leader Lifespan Inequalities), “Overall, it's been an absolute pleasure to work with Jiaxin over the past four years, and we will all miss him when he continues his academic journey in University of Wisconsin-Madison in September,“ she adds.

His dissertation was supervised by Alyson van Raalte and Christiaan Monden (University of Oxford) and he  was part of the The International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a three-year doctoral program that merges demography, epidemiology and data science. 

List of published papers in the context of the dissertation

Shi, J.; Aburto, J. M.; Martikainen, P.; Tarkiainen, L.; van Raalte, A. A.:

A distributional approach to measuring lifespan stratification

Population Studies 77:1, 15–33. (2023)    

Shi, J.; Dudel, C.; Monden, C.; van Raalte, A. A.:

Inequalities in retirement lifespan in the United States

Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 78:5, 891–901. (2023)       

Shi, J.; Kolk, M.:

How does mortality contribute to lifetime pension inequality? Evidence from five decades of Swedish taxation data

Demography 59:5, 1843–1871. (2022)    

Shi, J.; Tarkiainen, L.; Martikainen, P.; van Raalte, A. A.:

The impact of income definitions on mortality inequalities

SSM-Population Health 15:100915, 1–25. (2021)