Overview
Julia Yates is an Amherst College economics graduate (B.A. with honors, 2016; faculty advisor: Professor Caroline Theoharides). Author of a 2016 undergraduate thesis using Massachusetts health reform as a natural experiment to estimate the effect of affordable health insurance access on the SSI acceptance rate — the first study focused specifically on the acceptance rate (rather than application counts or participation) as the primary outcome variable.
Key Contributions / Features
- Introduced the SSI acceptance rate as a dependent variable for health reform analysis, filling a gap left by prior studies focused on application volumes or participation levels
- Identified applicant pool composition (not application quality) as the dominant mechanism through which health insurance access affects SSI acceptance, using channel analysis with both state-level SSA data and individual-level ACS probit regressions
- Applied Akerlof's (1978) tagging framework to the SSI market to formalize the role of information asymmetry
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