Health Economics Seminar with Andrew Goodman-Bacon 

Andrew Goodman-Bacon is an economist at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His research is in economic history, health economics, public economics, and applied econometrics.

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Health Economics Seminar with Steve Raphael 

Talk Title: The Effects of Mandatory Ignition Interlock Devices on DUI Recidivism

Steve Raphael is a Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and holds the James D. Marver Chair at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His research focuses on the economics of low-wage labor markets, housing, and the economics of crime and corrections.  His most recent research focuses on the social consequences of the large increases in U.S. incarceration rates and racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes.  Raphael also works on immigration policy, research questions pertaining to various aspects of racial inequality, the economics of labor unions, social insurance policies, homelessness, and low-income housing.  

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Health Economics Seminar with Amanda Kowalski

Talk Title: Counting Defiers in Health Care: A Design-Based Model of an Experiment Can Reveal Evidence Against Monotonicity (joint with Neil Christy)

Amanda Kowalski, the Gail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Department of Economics, is a health economist who specializes in bringing together experiments, models grounded in context-specific knowledge, and econometric techniques to answer questions that inform current debates in health policy.

Professor Kowalski’s recent research analyzes experiments and clinical trials with the goal of designing policies to target insurance expansions and medical treatments to individuals who will benefit from them most. Her previous research has explored impacts of health insurance through Medicaid expansions, the Affordable Care Act, the Massachusetts health reform of 2006, and employer-sponsored plans.  She has also examined impacts of health spending on at-risk newborns.

Paper info: We show that a design-based model of an experiment with a binary intervention and outcome can reveal empirical evidence against a “monotonicity” assumption that the intervention affects all subjects in weakly the same direction. The canonical sampling-based model cannot reveal evidence against monotonicity, but we show that design-based models and other sampling-based models can. We use statistical decision theory to propose a maximum likelihood decision rule that does not assume monotonicity and establish conditions for its optimality.  Under these conditions, the performance of our rule relative to a design-based rule that assumes monotonicity increases with the sample size across all possible experiments with 4 to 40 subjects. In a given experiment, we quantify evidence against monotonicity with a likelihood ratio.  With the aid of figures that we develop to visualize potential outcomes, we illustrate evidence against monotonicity in a real experiment that examines the impact of a health care intervention. Even though the experiment shows a large and statistically significant average effect in one direction, our rule reveals positive counts of compilers who respond in that direction and defiers who respond in the other.

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Health Economics Seminar with Anna Aizer 

Anna Aizer received her degree in Economics from UCLA in 2003 and came to Brown in 2004 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University's Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. She is a labor and health economist with interests in the area of child health and well-being. Her current work considers the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of poverty.  In particular, she focuses on the roles played by health insurance and access to medical care,  domestic violence, exposure to environmental toxins, the role of stress, and poor children's greater interaction with the juvenile justice system in explaining why the children of poor mothers are more likely to grow up to be poor themselves. 

Health Economics Seminar with David Cutler  

 David Cutler is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He advises many companies and groups on health care.

Professor Cutler was a key advisor in the formulation of the recent cost control legislation in Massachusetts, and is one of the members of the Health Policy Commission created to help reduce medical spending in that state.

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Health Economics Seminar with Zach Brown  

Zach Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at University of Michigan and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests are in industrial organization and applied microeconomics.

Health Economics Seminar with David Molitor 

 
David Molitor is an Associate Professor and Hewitt Faculty Fellow in the Department of Finance at Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Director of Gies Health Initiatives at Gies College of Business and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Molitor’s research explores how location and the environment shape health and health care delivery in the United States. He is a Principal Investigator of the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a large-scale field experiment of workplace wellness conducted at the University of Illinois.

Talk Title: TBD

C. Jason Wang, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy and director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention at Stanford University. He received his B.S. from MIT, M.D. from Harvard, and Ph.D. in policy analysis from RAND.  Dr. Wang’s research interests include: 1) developing tools for assessing and improving the quality of healthcare; 2) facilitating the use of innovative consumer technology in improving quality of care and health outcomes; 3) studying competency-based medical education curriculum, and 4) improving health systems performance.

Talk Title: HIV Outbreak and Response in Scott County, Indiana: A Case Study in Public Health Decision Making

Gregg Gonsalves is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health and an Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Yale Law School. At Yale, he also co-directs the Global Health Justice Partnership, an initiative of YSPH and YLS, working at the intersections of health and human rights and social justice. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

'Healthcare Provider Bankruptcies'

Adrienne Sabety, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Sabety's research focuses on healthcare and social determinants of health. She received a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley and her PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University.  

Link to paper