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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 

Talk Title: Spillovers from Medicare Hospital Payment to Commercial Hospital Prices and Operating Efficiency 

Michael Chernew, PhD, is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the Director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation (HMR) Lab in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chernew’s research examines several areas related to improving the health care system including studies of novel benefit designs, Medicare Advantage, alternative payment models, low value care and the causes and consequences of rising health care spending.   

About the Event: Why do states start conflicts they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Tyler Jost’s book, Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation (Cambridge Studies in International Relations series; Cambridge University Press, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political.

About the Speaker: Tyler Jost is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He is currently on sabbatical leave as the David and Cindy Edelson Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on national security decision-making, bureaucratic politics, and Chinese foreign policy. His research has been published in International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Studies Quarterly. Dr. Jost’s first book, Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge University Press), examines how different types of bureaucratic institutions across the world lead to better and worse foreign policy decisions. He is currently working on a second book examining the domestic origins of international engagement. Dr. Jost completed his doctoral degree in the Department of Government at Harvard University and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Belfer Center International Security Program at the Kennedy School of Government, as well as in the China and the World Program at Columbia University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.