Self-employment and health in later life: Refining and expanding the estimation of treatment effects using Swedish registry data

Cal J. Halvorsen, PhD, MSW is an associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, a project lead and investigator at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Center for Work, Health, & Well-Being, and a senior research fellow at CoGenerate.

He is an expert on self-employment, job-training programs, volunteering in later life, and intergenerational initiatives. His research has been funded by the U.S.

Social Security Administration, National Institutes of Health, and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, among others. Our aim for Dr. Halvorsen’s travel is to strengthen our collaborations.

In March and April 2024, he was a Forte-funded visiting scholar at  Karolinska Institute Unit of Occupational Medicine.

His visit was a major success: In six weeks, he learned to use Swedish registry data and developed weights that estimate how later-life self-employment influences health and well-being outcomes.

Since then, our research group has used these weights to estimate how self-employment impacts psychotropic medication prescriptions and income. In Summer 2025, we plan to deepen our collaborations with Dr.

Halvorsen to refine and expand the use of these weights while developing new international research collaborations, including to identify funding to support visits by members of our group to his institution.An expert on public scholarship who has been featured in The New York Times and other outlets, Dr.

Halvorsen will be able to strengthen our research group’s communication activities so that our research is seen and understood outside of academia.

His expertise includes publishing white papers and pre-prints, op-eds, and research collaborations with community organizations.

During his last visit, his presentation on public scholarship was well received and, after this, we have received requests for further exchange around this topic. His 10-week visit is planned for late May to early August 2025.