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Home > For the Media Home > Biosketches > By Topic > Labor Markets

Biosketches - Labor Markets

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Research in this area looks specifically at how Labor Markets and labor supply effect health insurance coverage.
 
Bansak, Cynthia
Baughman, Reagan
Benitez-Silva, Hugo
Bhattacharya, Jay
Blumberg, Linda J.
Borjas, George J.
Bound, John
Cancian, Maria
Cawley, John
Chernew, Michael
Dey, Matthew
Ellis, Randall
Flinn, Christopher
Garrett, Bowen
Goldman, Dana
Gruber, Jonathan
Hamilton, Darrick
Haveman, Robert
Hirth, Richard
Kapur, Kanika
Kimball, Miles S.
Kreider, Brent
Lang, Kevin
Levy, Helen
Ma, Ching-to Albert
Madrian, Brigette
Marquis, Susan
Maxwell, Nan L.
McLaughlin, Catherine
Nichols, Len
Paringer, Lynn
Royalty, Anne
Senesky Dolfin, Sarah.
Shelton, Emily
Simon, Kosali
Silverman, Dan
Swartz, Katherine
Tian, Wei-Hua

CYNTHIA BANSAK, PH.D.
Cynthia Bansak is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at San Diego State University. Prior to her current position, she was an Economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at San Diego and a B.A. in economics from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests fall broadly within the field of labor economics. Current work focuses on the relationship between banking and remittances, and the role of access to transportation in determining employment outcomes.

REAGAN BAUGHMAN, PH.D.
Reagan Baughman is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of New Hampshire. She received her bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Drew University in Madison, NJ in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse University in 2001. From 2001 to 2003 she was a research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include the effectiveness of tax subsidies to employer-provided health insurance for lower-skill workers, the impact of Medicaid and SCHIP expansions on coverage patterns for children and the labor market for nursing and home health aides.

HUGO BENITEZ-SILVA, PH.D.
Hugo Benítez-Silva obtained his M.A., M.Ph., and Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in December 2000. His research includes contributions to the analyses of disability programs in the United States, dynamic life-cycle models of annuity and portfolio decisions with an emphasis on modeling the effects of uncertainty in wage income and capital investments, the study of retirement expectations, and the labor supply effects of the early retirement rules. His current work includes the estimation of a dynamic structural life-cycle model of retirement and disability, a dynamic analyzes of job search behavior among older Americans, and the connection between automobile recalls and accidents. His research projects have received support from the Michigan Retirement Research Center, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the TIAA-CREF Institute, the National Institute of Aging, and the Economic Research Initiative for the Uninsured through the RWJ Foundation. His research has been published in journals like the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, and Labour Economics.

JAY BHATTACHARYA, M.D., PH.D.
Jay Bhattacharya is an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University. Jay finished his M.D. in 1997 and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2000 on the subject of physician wages in the United States. Bhattacharya's research interests can best be summarized as the microeconometric analysis of health and health care for special populations. He has published empirical economics and health services research papers on the elderly, on adolescents, on HIV patients, on the disabled, on injured workers, and on managed care experts. Most recently, he has done work on the regulation of viatical settlements market, which is a secondary life insurance market popular among HIV patients, and on summer-winter differences in nutritional outcomes for poor American families.

LINDA J. BLUMBERG, PH.D.
Linda J. Blumberg, Ph.D. is an economist and senior research associate at the Urban Institute. She is currently working on a variety of projects related to private health insurance and health care financing. Her recent work includes: an analysis of the private and public cost impacts of government reinsurance programs; a decomposition of the sources of the decline in employer-sponsored insurance over the last recession; and an analysis of recent changes in the health insurance coverage of the middle class. She has estimated the coverage and risk pool impacts of tax credit proposals and public insurance expansions, estimated price elasticities of employers offering and workers taking-up health insurance, and analyzed the effects of insurance market reforms on the risk pool of the privately insured. She is also the principal investigator in the development and use of the Urban Institute's Health Insurance Reform Simulation Model (HIRSM). From August 1993 through October 1994 Dr. Blumberg served as health policy advisor to the Clinton Administration during its initial health care reform effort.

GEORGE J BORJAS, PH.D.
George J. Borjas is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Borjas has written extensively on labor market issues. He is the author of several books, including Labor Economics (McGraw-Hill, 1996; 2 nd Edition, 2000), and Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1999). He has published over 100 articles in books and scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Professor Borjas currently edits the Review of Economics and Statistics.

JOHN BOUND, PH.D.
John Bound, Professor of Economics, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and joined the faculty at Michigan in 1987. He is interested in labor economics, demography and econometrics. Professor Bound is also a Research Associate of the Population Studies Center and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His current research interests include work on the economic and health status of minority populations in the U.S. and the effects of transfer programs on behavior and economic well being. He has also worked on issues regarding changes in the wage structure over time and on the validity of survey data. His teaching centers on econometrics and labor economics.

MARIA CANCIAN, PH.D.
Maria Cancian is Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs, an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, and Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. Her research is in the area of domestic social policy. Her recent research considers the impact of married women's growing employment and earnings on marriage patterns and the inter- and intra-household distribution of income, the work and income of women who have received welfare, and the implications of child support and custody for the well-being of divorced and never-married families. Since 1997 she has been Principal Investigator, with Daniel R. Meyer, of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation, which evaluates child-support policy implemented as part of welfare reform in Wisconsin.

Professor Cancian has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. She is Secretary of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Her articles have appeared in journals including Demography, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Review of Economics and Statistics and Social Service Review . She received her doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan.

JOHN CAWLEY, PH.D.
John Cawley is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 1999-2001. His primary field of research is health economics; his research on insurance has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Health Economics, and Frontiers in Health Policy Research. John has served on advisory committees and expert panels for the Institute of Medicine, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. He is an associate editor of the journal Economics and Human Biology, and in 2005 was awarded the John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators in health services research.

MICHAEL CHERNEW, PH.D.
Dr. Chernew is Professor at the University of Michigan in the department of Health Management and Policy. He also has appointments in the departments of Internal Medicine, and Economics. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, where his training focused on areas of applied microeconomics and econometrics. Dr. Chernew is Co-Editor of the American Journal of Managed Care and Co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Research program at the University of Michigan. One major area of Dr. Chernew's research focuses on assessing the impact of managed care on the health care marketplace, with an emphasis on examining the impact of managed care on health care cost growth and on the use of medical technology. In 2000 and 2004, he served on technical advisory panels for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that reviewed the assumptions used by the Medicare actuaries to assess the financial status of the Medicare trust funds. On the panels Dr. Chernew focused on the methodology used to project trends in long term health care cost growth. Other research has examined determinants of patient choice of hospital and the impact of health plan performance measures on employee and employer selection of health plans. In 1998, he was awarded the John D. Thompson Prize for Young investigators by the Association of University Programs in Public Health. In 1999, he received the Alice S. Hersh, Young Investigator Award from the Association of Health Services Research. Both of these awards recognize overall contribution to the field of health services research. Dr. Chernew is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and he is on the Editorial Boards of Health Services Research, Health Affairs, and Medical Care Research and Review.

MATTHEW DEY, PH.D.
Matthew Dey received his PhD from New York University in May 2001 after completing his dissertation entitled "Employer-Provided Health Insurance: Mobility, Efficiency, and Labor Market Equilibrium." He joined the University of Chicago faculty in August of 2000.

RANDALL ELLIS, PH.D
Randall Ellis is a Professor of Economics at Boston University where he has been on the faculty since 1981. He is currently a director of the International Health Economics Association and the American Society of Health Economists, as well as an associate editor of the Journal of Health Economics. Professor Ellis is best known for his work on provider, and health plan payment incentives, particularly on how payments affect consumer, provider and health plan decisions. He is one of the co-developers of the Diagnostic Cost Group risk adjustment model currently being used for the U.S. Medicare program to capitate managed care plans.

CHRISTOPHER FLINN, PH.D.
Christopher Flinn is Professor of Economics at New York University, a Coeditor of the Journal of Human Resources, and an Associate Editor of the European Economic Review and the Review of Economics of the Household . He is a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Research Fellow of IZA (Bonn), a member of the Scientific Committee of CHILD at the University of Torino, and has recently been elected as President of the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE). He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago after studying demography at the University of Michigan, and has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include labor market dynamics (especially job mobility) and intrahousehold bargaining. He is currently completing a monograph on theoretical and empirical approaches to assessing the impact of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes for the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Other projects in progress include research on the relationship between child outcomes and the marital status of parents (with Meta Brown), the construction and estimation of a model of intrahousehold bargaining and labor market search (with Matt Dey), and the estimation of a model of household labor supply with an endogenous decision of whether to behave cooperatively (with Daniela Del Boca).

BOWEN GARRETT, PH.D
Dr. Bowen Garrett is a Senior Research Associate in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. He is currently leading research projects on the effects of recession on insurance coverage, racial and ethnic disparities in health care access and utilization, and Medicare's new prospective payment system for inpatient psychiatric facilities. He is also working with a team of researchers on ways to improve Medicare's prospective payment system for skilled nursing home facilities. His recent publications examined the health insurance coverage implications of leaving welfare, the effects of Medicaid managed care on health services access and use, the effects of welfare policies and economic factors on Medicaid caseloads, and policy interactions between the Supplemental Security Income and Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs.

Before joining the Urban Institute in 1998, Dr. Garrett was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Garrett obtained his Ph.D. in 1996 from the Department of Economics at Columbia University, with specializations in econometrics and labor economics.

DANA GOLDMAN, PH.D.
Dana Goldman holds the RAND Chair in Health Economics and is Director of Health Economics at RAND. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Health Services and Radiology at UCLA. His research interests combine applied microeconomics and health economics-with a special interest in the economics of chronic disease. His work has been published in leading medical, economic, statistics, and health policy journals and has been funded by both the public and private sectors, including NIH, NIA, NCI, NSF, Amgen, Merck, Genentech, California Healthcare Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Labor, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Most recently, he is the director of the RAND Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation designed to provide better estimates of the impact of health policy changes. He is on several editorial boards including Health Affairs and the American Journal of Managed Care. Dr. Goldman was the recipient of the National Institute for Health Care Management Research Foundation award for excellence in health policy, and the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award that recognizes the outstanding contributions of a young scholar to the field of health services research.  He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research.  He received his B.A from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

JONATHAN GRUBER, PH.D.
Dr. Jonathan Gruber is a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the Director of the Program on Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a Research Associate. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics , and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics.

Dr. Gruber received his B.S. in Economics from MIT, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. He has received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a FIRST award from the National Institute on Aging, and the Kenneth Arrow Award for the Best Paper in Health Economics in 1994. He was also one of 15 scientists nationwide to receive the Presidential Faculty Fellow Award from the National Science Foundation in 1995. During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber was on leave as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department.

Dr. Gruber's research focuses on the areas of public finance and health economics. His recent areas of particular interest include the economics of employer provided health insurance, the efficiency of our current system of delivering health care to the indigent, the effect of the Social Security program on retirement behavior, and the economics of smoking.

DARRICK HAMILTON, PH.D.
Darrick Hamilton is an Assistant Professor at the Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University. He earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At the University of North Carolina, he received the department's Most Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, and upon graduation received the National Economic Association's 2001 Rhonda M. Williams Dissertation Award. Professor Hamilton was a Ford Foundation Fellow on Poverty, the Underclass and Public Policy at both the Poverty Research and Training Center, and the Program for Research on Black Americans at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1999-2001. Hamilton was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University from 2001-2003. His research agenda involves examining the welfare of less "privileged" groups and ethnic/racial group competition for preferred economic and health outcomes. He has published numerous articles on ethnic and racial disparities in; wealth, homeownership, and labor market outcomes. His research agenda has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

ROBERT HAVEMAN, PH.D.
Robert Haveman is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Affairs and Research Affliliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely in the fields of public finance, the economics of environmental and natural resources policy, benefit-cost analysis, and the economics of poverty and social policy. Recent publications include Succeeding Generations: On the Effects of Investments in Children. Current projects include work on the discrepancy in reported earnings in surveys compared to administrative records, on the adequacy of savings of older workers beginning retirement, and on implications of increased economic inequality for human capital in the future. He is an award-winning teacher, who continues to teach at the La Follette School, of which he was director from 1988 to 1991. He was director of the Institute for Research on Poverty from 1971 to 1975.

Professor Haveman has served as senior economist, Subcommittee on Economy in Government, Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress. He was a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation and, on two occasions, a research associate at Resources for the Future. In 2003, he and co-authors Andrew Bershadker and Jonathan A. Schwabish published the book Human Capital in the United States from 1975 to 2000: Patterns of Growth and Utilization (Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute for Employment Research). His work has appeared in the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association.

He received his doctorate in economics from Vanderbilt University.

RICHARD HIRTH, PH.D.
Dr. Richard Hirth is Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy, and Chairman of the Health Services Organization and Policy (HSOP) Doctoral Program. He received his Bachelor's degree in Economics from Carleton College, and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Hirth has received several research awards, including the Kenneth J. Arrow Award in Health Economics, awarded annually by the American Public Health Association and the International Health Economics Association to the best paper in health economics (1993); the Excellence in Research Award in Health Policy from the Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation (1998); and the Thompson Prize for Young Investigtors from the Association of University Programs in health Administration (1999).

KANIKA KAPUR, PH.D.
Kanika Kapur is an economist with RAND in Santa Monica, California. She received her Ph.D. in 1997 from Northwestern University and her B.A. in 1992 from Dartmouth College. Her research interests span several areas of health and labor economics. She has authored several studies that examine the labor market implications of employer provided health insurance. She has also studied the role of individual health insurance market in reaching the uninsured. In other work, she has examined the determinants of health expenditures, including the importance of health plan structure and the role of socio-economic and racial characteristics.

MILES S. KIMBALL, PH.D.
Miles Kimball does research on business cycles, economic behavior under uncertainty, and the survey measurement of preference parameters. He is particularly interested in labor supply, the timing of retirement, consumption/saving choices, portfolio allocation on the household side and the effects of technology shocks on the economy as a whole.

BRENT KREIDER, PH.D.
Brent Kreider (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an associate professor of economics at Iowa State University . His fields of specialization include public economics, applied econometrics, labor economics, and health economics. Recent empirical work develops methods for improving inferences about relationships between public policy and outcome measures of interest such as labor supply, program participation, and health care utilization among the disabled and other low-income groups. Part of this research investigates what can be learned in the presence of non-classical measurement error in key variables, such as disability or health insurance status. Although primarily an applied economist, he has also written theoretical articles on optimal taxation, tax incidence, income uncertainty, and human capital accumulation.

KEVIN LANG, PH.D.
Kevin Lang received his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford University, his MSc in economics from the University of Montreal, and his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is presently a professor and chair of the department of economics at Boston University. He serves as co-editor of Labour Economics, the journal of the European Association of Labor Economists. He spent a year at the National Bureau of Economic Research (where he is presently a Research Associate) on a prestigious Olin Foundation Fellowship and three months at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research on a Fullbright Fellowship. He was the recipient of an Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. Dr. Lang's research has been funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation. His research focuses on the economics of labor markets and education, including such topics as discrimination, unemployment, the relation between education and earnings and the relation between housing prices, taxes and local services. In addition to publishing widely in leading academic journals, Dr. Lang maintains an active role in public affairs. He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum. In his home town of Brookline, Massachusetts, he serves as chair of the elected school board.

HELEN LEVY, PH.D.
Helen G. Levy is Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and an Assistant Research Scientist at the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured. Her interests include health and labor economics. Her most recent work explores trends in health insurance coverage for low-skilled adults and the consequences of being uninsured for access to medical care.

Levy received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California at Berkeley. She has served as a research analyst for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

CHING-TO ALBERT MA, PH.D.
Ching-to Albert Ma is professor of economics at Boston University, and the Director of the Industry Studies Program of the Boston University Economics Department. He is a coeditor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, and an associate editor of the Rand Journal of Economics. Ma's research areas are in industrial organization, and health economics. His recent papers study dual-market job incentives, physician agency and asymmetric information, patient compliance and treatment progress, and selection in insurance and healthcare markets. In 1998, together with coauthor Thomas McGuire, Ma was awarded the Kenneth J. Arrow Award in Health Economics. He received a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1988.

BRIGETTE MADRIAN, PH.D.
Brigitte Madrian is an Associate Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School where she holds the Boettner Chair in Financial Gerontology. Before coming to Wharton in 2003, she was a faculty member at the University of Chicago (1995-2003) and Harvard University (1993-1995). She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources.

Dr. Madrian's research focuses on employee benefits and social insurance programs, particularly retirement savings plans and health insurance. Her current research focuses on the relationship between 401(k) plan design and employee saving outcomes. She has also examined the impact of health insurance on the job choice and retirement decisions of employees and the hiring decisions of firms.

Dr. Madrian received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied economics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. She is the recipient of the National Academy of Social Insurance Dissertation Prize (first place, 1994) and the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Scholarly Research on Lifelong Financial Security (2002).

M. SUSAN MARQUIS, PH.D.
M. Susan Marquis (Ph.D., Economist, University of Michigan, 1978) is a Senior Economist at RAND in Washington, DC. She has over 30 years experience in analysis of health policy issues. Her research emphasizes policies to expand health insurance coverage and the effect of financing on access to health care. Dr. Marquis recently led a project to study the individual insurance market in California and explore how financial subsidies and other public policy might increase the role that market plays in covering the uninsured. She also recently completed a simulation study of the effects of California's pay or play employer mandate that was enacted in 2003 and subsequently narrowly overturned in referendum. She has led studies of the effect of state insurance market reforms, of Medicare beneficiary choices among alternative types of health plans, the demand for supplementary health insurance, and the effects of alternative financing policies on demand for private and public insurance. She has participated in designing and implementing evaluations of innovative financing arrangements and was a member of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment analysis team. She has served on advisory and technical panels for HCFA, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, the Physician Payment Review Commission, the National Institutes of Health, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Washington Business Group on Health. She has presented her research before academic and policy audiences, including testimony before the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. She received the NIHCM Sixth Annual Health Care Research Award in 1999.

NAN L. MAXWELL, PH.D.
Nan L. Maxwell is a Professor and Co-Chair of Economics and the Executive Director of the Human Investment Research and Education (HIRE) Center at California State University, Hayward. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Florida State University in 1983 and was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (for three years) and the National Center for Research in Vocational Education at the University of California, Berkeley and has held a visiting professor position at the Academy of National Economy (Moscow, Russia). Dr. Maxwell’s research interest fall broadly within the field of labor economics. She is the author or co-author of papers published in leading economic and education journals, including Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, Economic Inquiry, American Economic Review, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Educational Research, Social Science Quarterly, Population Policy Review, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Contemporary Policies Issues, and Social Forces. She has published two books, High School Career Academies: A Pathway to Educational Reform in Urban Schools? (published by the W.E. Upjohn Institute) and Income Inequality in the United States, 1947-1985 (published by Greenwood Press) and has a third, Moving on Up: Getting, Keeping and Moving from Low-Skilled Jobs, currently under review.

CATHERINE MCLAUGHLIN, PH.D.
Dr. McLaughlin is a Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy and the Director of the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU) at the University of Michigan. ERIU, a five-year initiative funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has been conducting and disseminating research aimed at increasing our understanding of the interaction between health and labor market dynamics and the uninsured. In addition, Dr. McLaughlin is the director of the University of Michigan component of the Agency for Health Care Policy Research's Center of Excellence on Managed Care Markets and Quality directed by Harold Luft at University of California, San Francisco. The projects being pursued at Michigan focus on the dynamic interaction between plan performance measures, market structure, and employer behavior.

Dr. McLaughlin is also currently the Vice-Chair of the Citizens' Health Care Working Group and a Senior Associate Editor of Health Services Research. From 1993 to 2003 she was the Director of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Michigan. Her current research interests are focused on the uninsured, managed care, market competition, and employer and employee benefit choice.

Dr. McLaughlin has studied various health economics topics. She has published numerous articles on the impact of HMOs on market competition and health care costs, the determinants of small area variation in hospital utilization and costs, and issues surrounding the working uninsured. Recent publications include: “The Long-Term and Short-Term Effects of a Copayment Increase on the Utilization and Expenditures of Prescription Drugs,” in Inquiry, “Donated Care Programs: A Stopgap Measure or a Long-Run Alternative to Health Insurance?” in Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, “Quality and Employers' Choice of Health Plans,” in Journal of Health Economics, "Causes and Consequences of Lack of Health Insurance: Gaps in Our Knowledge," in Health Policy and the Uninsured , Urban Institute Press; "Who Walks Through the Door? The Effect of the Uninsured" in Health Affairs; "Medigap Premiums and Medicare HMO Enrollment" in Health Services Research; "The Who, What, and How of Managed Care," The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law; "Health Care Consumers: Choices and Constraints" in Medical Care Research and Review, "Competition, Quality of Care, and The Role of Consumers," in The Milbank Quarterly, and "The Demand for Health Insurance Coverage by Low-Income Workers: Can Reduced Premiums Achieve Full Coverage?," in Health Services Research.

Professor McLaughlin received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin.

LEN NICHOLS, PH.D.
Len Nichols joined the Center for Studying Health System Change as Vice President in October of 2001. He provides leadership in shaping the research of the Center to inform the policy process in a timely and nonpartisan way, in addition to continuing his own research agenda related to private health insurance and health care markets. During the first two years of the Clinton Administration, Dr. Nichols was the Senior Advisor for Health Policy at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He managed and coordinated cost and revenue estimation for President Clinton's Health Security Act (HSA) and its congressional successors. After OMB, Dr. Nichols was a Principle Research Associate at the Urban Institute until 2001. Prior to OMB, Dr. Nichols was a visiting Public Health Service Fellow at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research during 1991-1992, and prior to that he was an Associate Professor and Economics Department Chair at Wellesley College, where he taught from 1980-1991. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois in 1980.

LYNN PARINGER, PH.D.
Dr. Lynn Paringer is a Professor of Economics and the Associate Director of the Human Investment in Research and Education (HIRE) Center at California State University, East Bay. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Prague School of Economics, served as the Associate Dean of the School of Business and Economics at California State University, Hayward, and was a Research Associate at the Urban Institute (Washington D.C.). She is a nationally recognized expert in health economics with areas of emphasis including access to health insurance, economic cost of disease, HIV costs and testing, medical care utilization, the provision of employment based health insurance to disadvantaged workers, and employer responses to rising health care costs and the impact of case mix adjustments on health plan performance ratings. She has published in leading economic and health care journals including Health Affairs, Inquiry, Quarterly Review of Business and Economics, Health Care Financing Review, American Economic Review, Medical Care, Health Policy Education, and Public Health Reports.

Dr. Paringer received her doctorate in Economics from the University of Wisconsin.

ANNE ROYALTY, PH.D.
Anne Royalty is currently an Associate Professor of Economics at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Prior to coming to IUPUI, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Royalty's current research focuses on employer-provided health insurance and other fringe benefits. Recent work includes analyses of price elasticities for employer-provided health insurance, estimation of workers' valuation of employer expenditures on health insurance benefits, and investigations of health insurance choices of two-earner households.

SARAH SENESKY DOLFIN, PH.D.
Sarah Senesky Dolfin is a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Her interests focus broadly on labor economics, including labor supply and the role of employers in determining hours of work. Her current work in the labor area involves examining the effect of overtime laws, measuring compliance with FLSA regulations, and evaluating the impact of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program on workers' wage and employment outcomes. Dolfin also pursues research on education and immigration, including evaluating the impact of high-intensity mentoring support for teachers on student and teacher outcomes, and analyzing the role played by networks in migration decisions.

Prior to her current position, Dolfin was an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine. She received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 2000 and a B.A. magna cum laude in economics from Princeton University.

EMILY SHELTON, PH.D. Student
Emily Shelton is a Ph.D. student in the University of Michigan Department of Health Management and Policy. She earned a B.A. from the University of Iowa and worked for 2 years in the health and human resources division at the Congressional Budget Office. Her research topics include the demand for medical care and health insurance, including labor market sorting and Medicare hospital reimbursement policy. Next year, she will advance to candidacy.

DAN SILVERMAN, PH.D.
Dan Silverman is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan . He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in the Spring of 2002. Dr. Silverman's research interests bridge public and labor economics. He has authored papers on the effects of welfare reform on labor supply, the economics of violent crime, and the potential social sources of income disparities. Recent work investigates the influence of cognitive biases on the decision to invest in health insurance and healthy activities.

KOSALI SIMON, PH.D.
Kosali Simon is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Maryland at College Park in 1999. Her research and teaching interests focus on policy oriented issues in health economics, labor economics and public finance.

KATHERINE SWARTZ, PH.D.
Prof. Swartz's current research interests focus on the population without health insurance and efforts to increase access to health care coverage, as well as health care financing and organization. She is finishing a book on the uninsured and how government-sponsored reinsurance could increase access to private health insurance coverage. The book is tentatively titled Reinsuring Health; it should be published by Spring 2006.

Prof. Swartz has been a member of the faculty in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health since 1992. From 1982 to 1992, she was with the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. In November 1995, Prof. Swartz became the editor of Inquiry, a journal that focuses on health care organization and financing. She was the 1991 recipient of the David Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management for research done before the age of 40 that has had a significant impact on public policy. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin and a BS in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

WEI-HUA TIAN, PH.D.
Wei-Hua Tian is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. She has a Ph.D. (2004) in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include Labor Economics, Health Economics, and Public Economics with specializations in analyzing the policy effects of social welfare programs.