Overview
Health economist at Dartmouth College (Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice). Works on socioeconomic disparities in health, mortality, and healthcare utilization. Known for research documenting the widening of education and income gradients in mortality in the United States across the late 20th century.
Key Contributions / Features
- Co-author with Cutler (2001): decomposed 20th-century US mortality decline into three mechanistically distinct eras using age-group contributions to life expectancy (Table 1), provided DiD evidence for the antibiotic contribution (−3.8%/year), and introduced the "medicalization of death" framework for the post-1960 CVD regime.
- Co-author with Richards and Cutler (2008) on changes in disparities in health by education, 1981–2001 — an early study documenting the widening education-mortality gradient.
- Co-author of Cutler et al. (2011), which showed that behavioral risk factors (smoking, obesity, hypertension, cholesterol) explain essentially none of the widening Education-Mortality Gradient between 1971–75 and 1987–2000. The widening is driven by growing coefficient effects — rising returns to education conditional on behaviors — not by differential trends in the behaviors themselves.
- Co-author of Cutler, Meara, and Richards-Shubik (2012): uses HRS micro data (men 52–64) to test and reject both health-shock and opportunity-cost mechanisms for DI cyclicality; 1 pp UR → +4.8/1000 application probability.
- Co-author of Cutler et al. (2015): identifies functional-limitation conditionality of recession-era DI applications; FL prevalence is recession-invariant; cohort analysis confirms recession is a timing effect on already-eligible workers.
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