Tuomas Markkula

Tuomas Markkula

PhD candidate in Economics

Aalto University and Helsinki GSE

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 am 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. However, affordable public services often face demand that exceeds supply, leading to long waiting times. Meanwhile, private options allow consumers to pay more to avoid waiting, raising equity issues. I examine how increasing public production's capacity affects waiting times, private practices' prices, and the distribution of consumer surplus using a structural model incorporating affordable but capacity-constrained public health care producers into a framework with price-setting private producers and consumer demand. 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. Consumer surplus and the use of dental care services increase, but the increase is less for the lowest income decile.

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

Interests

  • Industrial organization
  • Health economics
  • Structural econometrics

Education

  • PhD in Economics, 2025 (Expected)

    Aalto University and Helsinki GSE

Teaching

Macroeconomics: Policy, M.Sc. level

TA: Spring 2024

Urban and Regional Economics, PhD level

TA: Spring 2023, 2024

Empirical Industrial Organization I: Static models, PhD level

TA: Spring 2022

Econometrics 1, B.Sc. level

TA: Spring 2022

Econometrics 2, B.Sc. level

TA: Spring 2022, 2023

Empirical Industrial Economics, M.Sc. level

TA: Spring 2022

Development Economics I, M.Sc. level

TA: Fall 2020

Basics in Economics, B.Sc. level

TA: Fall 2019

Contact