Overview
Jacob Goldin is a professor at Stanford Law School and a Research Associate at NBER. His research spans tax policy, behavioral public economics, and health economics, with particular focus on how information frictions and salience affect individual behavior in tax and transfer programs. He is best known for co-authoring the first randomized experimental study to provide statistically significant evidence that health insurance reduces all-cause mortality — the IRS taxpayer outreach RCT published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2021).
Key Contributions / Features
- Goldin, Lurie, and McCubbin (2021): Designed and analyzed an IRS randomized informational letter experiment (N = 4.5 million households; 86% treated) targeting households that had paid the ACA individual mandate penalty in 2015. Found +1.3 pp coverage take-up among partially uninsured households and −6.1 basis points two-year all-cause mortality among ages 45–64 (p = 0.01). The 2SLS average causal response (ACR) of −0.17 pp per month of coverage is the first experimental estimate of insurance's effect on mortality. The paper also documents an adverse selection inversion: friction-impeded non-enrollees are high-benefit rather than low-benefit individuals. See Medicaid and Mortality and Information Frictions.
- Tax salience and information frictions: Broader research agenda on how individuals respond to tax incentives when the incentives are incompletely understood; related to the Information Frictions literature on EITC take-up and ACA marketplace enrollment.
- Administrative tax data for health policy: Collaborations with U.S. Treasury economists to use IRS Form 1095 A/B/C data — which provide individual-level monthly health insurance coverage records across all insurers — as the most complete available source for health insurance research.
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