Overview
Economist at the University of Virginia (Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy). Works on the macroeconomics of health — how business cycles, unemployment, and recessions affect mortality and health behaviors — and on the determinants of socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes. Best known for the finding that recessions reduce mortality (the pro-cyclical mortality hypothesis), though later work has shown the relationship is weaker for drug-related deaths.
Key Contributions / Features
- "Are Recessions Good for Your Health?" (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000): the original empirical finding that overall mortality is counter-cyclical — rising economic activity is associated with higher death rates, primarily through increased traffic accidents, cardiovascular events, and occupational injuries. This counterintuitive result prompted a large literature.
- "Recessions, Healthy No More?" (Journal of Health Economics, 2015): revisited and qualified the pro-cyclical mortality finding, showing it has weakened substantially post-1990 and does not hold for drug-related or alcohol-related deaths, which are pro-cyclical (worse in good times) for some groups.
- Co-author of Cutler et al. (2011), using NHANES I and NHIS data with Oaxaca-style hazard decompositions to establish that behavioral risk factors explain essentially none of the widening Education-Mortality Gradient between 1971–75 and 1987–2000. Growing coefficient effects — not changing risk factor levels — account for more than 90% of the widening.
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