NEW Economists in the Wild vid! MIT Economics’s Amy Finkelstein, Tamar Oostrom, and Abby Ostriker explore the effects of recommendations for mammograms at 40, combining biological modeling with econ analysis! Watch the clip below, then see the full vid! mru.io/finkelstein-44…

I didn’t apply to this job because I thought Amy was too well-known to hire a liberal arts biochem major Someone forwarded my materials, and long story short, I got the job, a PhD, a professorship, and a coauthor who includes juniors in YouTube videos Don’t self-screen — apply!

Attn econ/policy students: Highly recommend this ~5 min video featuring 3 health economists, inc ⁦MIT Economics⁩ prof Amy Finkelstein. Showcases *cost v benefit thinking *marginal v average *econ + medicine *careful empirical design *women in economics mru.org/courses/econom…

🙌🏼 Our AEA Session on bias and conflict of interest is going to be fantastic* *I’m probably biased aeaweb.org/conference/202…,

Please join us on Wednesday 2/10 at 2:30pm ET to hear Tamar Oostrom present her work on financial interests in clinical trials, with @EGolberstein moderating. Will be a great seminar! Registration (free, as always!): umn.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

A critical error that I see many grad students make: they try to estimate Frankenstein's model. Rather than viewing a model as answering a research question, they view a model as an arbitrary hodgepodge of models they learned about in their classes.

.Tamar Oostrom investigates the "sponsorship effect" in #clinicaltrials, where drugs in trials sponsored by industry were .15 st. dev. more effective than in trials w/o industry involvement. However, with #preregistration, the effect goes away. drive.google.com/file/d/1EQLCH0…

Expanding access to PCPs decreases ED use *42%* among high-risk undocumented immigrants. We need more programs like this. The cumulation of a years long effort with the incredible Rishi Sood nychealthy Jonathan Gruber +Jean!

Excited to share a new paper w/ Mark Duggan Atul Gupta Zachary Templeton. We examine the 40% decline in govt hospitals, largely driven by privatization. We quantify the effects of privatizing ownership on patient access and hospital profitability: nber.org/papers/w30824?…

Strong evidence that culture, in particular the decline in religion, has played a key role in the rise of "deaths of despair," from Tyler Giles, @D_Hungerman, and Tamar Oostrom nber.org/papers/w30840

Did declining religious participation in the late 1980s lead to increased deaths of despair (e.g. suicides) in the early 1990s? A new paper out this week tackles this question. I summarize the paper and give my take below.

Adding this to my annual review

Our final seminar of 2024 will be held this Wednesday, November 13 at 2:30 EST -- we are excited to have Jennifer Kao presenting "Representation in Product Development: Evidence from Insurance and Clinical Trials" joint with Tamar Oostrom Register here: bit.ly/3YGlUvH

Can you guess what happens when women are denied a wanted abortion? ... ... ... In the short run, their risk of death rises as a direct result. In the long run--a full 15 years later--women denied an abortion experience... -more health issues, -lower educational attainment,

This paper started when Alex asked if I would be interested in a job, and I countered by offering to be an unpaid intern with data access Duties: a few trips to Pittsburgh to get coffee and writing a neat paper on the effects of Medicaid reimbursement for behavioral health

This is in good Toronto neighborhoods, not Vancouver or LA. We social scientists did a poor job studying this. There've been 4 articles total in top 5 econ journals on opioids despite this being ~1 in 25 deaths in both the US and Canada, and much worse in age-adjusted terms. 2/8

In many cases, the most impressive contribution of a paper is data access. It’s odd (and bad for science) that process is not discussed in a paper’s methodology