I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in economics at Aalto University and Helsinki GSE, under the supervision of Otto Toivanen, Tanja Saxell and Ciprian Domnisoru.

I work on industrial organization and health economics. Currently, I use individual-level administrative data and structural models to study markets with public and private healthcare providers.

I will be on the 2024–2025 academic job market.

Contact information: tuomas.markkula@aalto.fi. Find my CV here.

Research

Job Market Paper

• Cutting the Queue to the Dentist: Waiting Time, Public-Private Interaction and Consumer Surplus (paper)

_{In industries where private and public production coexist, public production can incentivize private competition and address distributional concerns. Using a structural model that incorporates affordable but capacity-constrained public healthcare producers into a framework with price-setting private producers and consumer demand, I examine how increasing public production's capacity affects waiting times, private practices' prices, and the distribution of consumer surplus. I estimate the model using consumer-level visit data on the Finnish dental care industry. In the counterfactual simulation, I increase the number of dentists in public practices by 20%. This reduces waiting times at public practices on average by 5%, or 1.5 days, but does not affect private practice prices as consumers do not switch from private to public practices. The increase in capacity most benefits middle-income and younger consumers, as they gain the most from shorter public practice waiting times.}

Working Papers

• State Dependence in Health Care Provider Choice: Evidence from Dental Care (paper)

Work in Progress

• Who Waits and Why? Priority Setting in Health Care, with Tanja Saxell

Policy Work

• Competition and regulation in the Finnish ATM industry (2021), with Tuomas Takalo in BoF Economic Review