Michail Liatos

Michail studied Economics at the University of Piraeus in Greece, where he obtained his Bachelor’s degree (B.Sc.) in 2021. He subsequently completed his Master’s degree (M.Sc.) in Economics at FAU Erlangen–Nürnberg in February 2025. Michail joined the Professorship of Health Economics in July 2024 as a student assistant and has been a doctoral student and research associate there since March 2025. His research interests lie at the intersection of health and labor economics, as well as in behavioral health economics.

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Work in Progress

The Most Vulnerable Suffer Most: How Fear of Unemployment Exacerbates the Mental Health Gradient

with Harald Tauchmann

Labor market anxiety is a major driver of psychological distress, yet mean effects might obscure significant vulnerabilities among those with low psychological reserves. We investigate how the impact of job insecurity varies across the mental health distribution. Using German longitudinal data and a quantile regression framework with non-additive fixed effects, we address endogeneity by exploiting exogenous firm-specific staff fluctuations as an instrumental variable. Consistent with susceptibility theories, we find that the psychological burden is highly heterogeneous. While the impact is negligible for individuals in the upper tail of the distribution, the penalty reaches approximately -6 points on the Mental Component Summary (MCS) for those in the poorest mental health. We also demonstrate that standard additive models mask this gradient, underestimating the burden on vulnerable segments. Consequently, we argue that the psychological costs of job insecurity cannot be fully mitigated by broad social security systems alone, highlighting a need for targeted mental health interventions for those with the lowest psychological reserves.

Presentation Slides
(Biennial Conference of the European Health Economics Association (EuHEA), Rotterdam 2026)
Work in progress. Please do not cite without permission.