India is experiencing profound demographic changes and consequent shifts in the population age structure, though, unlike the experience of other countries, its demographic change is unique and unconventional. While declining fertility rates are often seen as a boost to women's empowerment, there are growing concerns about their impact on gender equity in India, including worsening sex ratios. One notable effect of this demographic shift is the rapid increase in the older population, particularly widows, who face heightened vulnerability shaped by cultural norms. This talk explores two key aspects of India's demographic changes: first, how fertility shifts have affected gender equity, and second, by estimating the economic value of widows, why we must move beyond cultural explanations to understand the vulnerability of widows in India.

K S James possesses extensive research and teaching experience in the field of Demography. He was formerly the Director and Senior Professor of the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. His work examines the interaction of socio-economic and policy forces on demographic factors, including fertility, marriage, gender and ageing in India.  He has several books and articles in his credit including papers in Science, Lancet Global Health, BMC Public Health, Social Science and Medicine, JAMA Network Open, Population Studies and Journal of Demographic Economics. He holds a postdoctoral training from Harvard Centre for Population and Development, Harvard University, USA and Ph.D from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been a visiting fellow in many prestigious institutes and universities including Harvard University, USA; London School of Economics, UK; International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA), Austria; University of Southampton, UK and University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Lunch will be served.

Co-sponsored by Peking University's Institute for Global Health and Development and the Asia Health Policy Program

(Friday, September 13, 2024, 9:00am to 10:30am - Beijing time)

In this seminar, distinguished speakers will share their insights on the intersection of cutting-edge technology and healthcare policy. The event will feature short presentations followed by an in-depth discussion, exploring what it takes to bring innovative healthcare solutions from concept to implementation.

Representing different facets of the healthcare ecosystem, the presenters will address key topics such as the application and economic impact of surgical robotics, the delicate balance between pharmaceutical regulation and innovation, technology for population health and chronic disease control, and the development of digital solutions for aging populations.

This seminar offers a unique opportunity for attendees to gain valuable insights into the latest trends in healthcare technology and policy, and to engage in meaningful dialogue about shaping a healthier, more efficient future for all.

Dr. Lei Xiaoyan is the MOE Cheung-Kong Scholar Professor of Economics, and PKU Boya Distinguished Professor. She is currently the chair of the Academic Committee of the National School of Development, the director of the PKU Center for Healthy Aging and Development Studies, and deputy director of the MOE-PKU Center for Human Capital and National Policy Research, co-editor of the Journal of Economics of Aging, and a research fellow of IZA. Her research spans the areas of labor economics, health economics, and economics of aging. Her research has been published in Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, among others. Since 2020, she has consecutively been included on Elsevier’s List of Highly-cited Scholars in China. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007.

Professor Min Yu graduated from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Zhejiang Medical University with a Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1988 and a Master's degree in Public Health from Beijing Medical University in 1998.

Professor Yu focuses on the prevention and control of chronic diseases and injuries. He has served as the chief editor or co-editor of five monographs and has published over 20 peer-reviewed papers. He has led one project under the National Key R&D Program’s “Precision Medicine Initiative” and three provincial or ministry-level projects. Professor Yu has received the third prize of the Science and Technology Award from the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association, the third prize of the Provincial Science and Technology Advancement Award, and the second prize of Provincial Medical and Health Science and Technology.

Dr. Beini Lyu's research interests are pharmacoepidemiology, clinical epidemiology of chronic diseases, real-world studies, and health technology assessment. Dr. Lyu’s work has been published in top medical journals such as the Lancet Regional Health-Americas, Diabetes Care, and the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. She served as PI of a research grant from the American Society of Diagnostic and Interventional Nephrology (ASDIN). She has received the Donn D 'Alessio Outstanding Student Award from the Department of Population Health at the University of Wisconsin, the American Heart Association Student Research Fellowship in Cardiovascular Disease, and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Student Abroad. Dr. Lyu received her M.D. from Peking University and her Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Jianan Yang's primary research fields are health economics and development economics, with specific interests in health policy reform, health behavior and healthcare demand, and pharmaceutical innovation. Her research papers have been published in leading international journals in development economics, such as the Journal of Development Economics. She has also served as an anonymous reviewer for renowned academic journals including the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of Health Economics, among others. She earned her bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Mathematics from Renmin University of China in 2016, and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2022. Before joining Peking University, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Asian Health Policy Program at Stanford University.

Dr. Yuhang Pan's research fields include environmental economics, health economics, and development economics, with a focus on using a causal inference approach to study the impact of environmental pollution, public policy, and climate change on health and social welfare. His works have been published in economics and scientific journals, such as Science, Nature Sustainability, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Dr. Pan obtained his undergraduate degree from Beijing Normal University in 2015 and his doctoral degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2021. Prior to joining Peking University, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Hong Kong.

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.