Biosketches - Vulnerable Populations

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ANNA AIZER, PH.D.
Anna Aizer (Ph.D., Economics, UCLA, 2002) is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is also a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Aizer’s research focuses on the health and well-being of children. Previous work has focused on the issues of program participation among low income families, especially in the context of the Medicaid program. This has included examinations of the role of outreach and network effects in increasing Medicaid program take-up among children as well as the impact of expanding Medicaid eligibility to parents on child take-up rates. Aizer’s current research focuses on the causes and consequences of domestic violence. In particular, she looks at the relationship between the closing of the male-female wage gap and falling rates of violence against women and the relationship between income, family violence and child health.

MARGARITA ALEGRIA, PH.D.
Dr. Margarita Alegría is Director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research (CMMHR) at Cambridge Health Alliance, and a full professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She has devoted her professional career to researching disparities in mental health and substance abuse services. A natural collaborator, Dr. Alegría has worked with investigators and researchers across the United States and Puerto Rico to generate research focused on improving health services for Latinos and other minority populations.

As the Director of CMMHR, Dr. Alegría oversees an interdisciplinary group of researchers and scholars, including psychologists, social policy analysts, health economists, psychiatrists, data analysts, sociologists, and other professionals that assist in the research, analysis and administration of the Center projects. She currently serves as the Principal Investigator of three National Institute of Mental Health-funded research studies. The Latino Research Program Project (LRPP) focuses on research to improve the mental health care of Latino populations, while the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) aims to estimate mental health and substance abuse disorders as well as rates of mental health and health service use for a nationally representative sample of Asians and Latinos. Additionally, Dr. Alegría serves as co-Principal Investigator of the NCMHD-funded Excellence in Partnerships for Community Outreach, Research on Health Disparities and Training (EXPORT). This study proposes to generate and test interventions that can remedy service disparities in asthma and mental health for disadvantaged Latino and African Caribbean populations.

Dr. Alegría's published works focus on the areas of mental health services research, conceptual and methodological issues with minority populations, risk behaviors, and disparities in service delivery. She received her Ph.D. from Temple University and was awarded the 2003 Mental Health Section Award at the 131st conference of the American Public Health Association.

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.

REBECCA M. BLANK, PH.D.
Rebecca M. Blank is Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Henry Carter Adams Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, and Professor of Economics. She is also the co-director of the National Poverty Center at the Ford School, funded by HHS to promote poverty-related research. Prior to coming to Michigan, she served as a Member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1997-1999. She has been Professor of Economics at Northwestern University and served as the first Director of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. Professor Blank's research has focused on the interaction between the macroeconomy, government anti-poverty programs, and the behavior and well-being of low-income families. Her 1997 book, It Takes A Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty, won the Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations. Her more recent work includes the book Finding Jobs: Work and Welfare Reform (jointly edited with David Card, 2000, Russell Sage Press), The New World of Welfare (jointly edited with Ron Haskins, 2001, Brookings Press), and Is the Market Moral? (co-authored with William McGurn, 2003, Brookings Press). She has served in a wide variety of advisory and professional roles and is a faculty affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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.

THOMAS BUCHMUELLER, PH.D.
Thomas Buchmueller is Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Director of the Center for Health Care Management and Policy at the University of California Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business. Professor Buchmueller is also an affiliate of UCI's Center for Health Policy Research and a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a Deputy Editor of Medical Care, Co-Editor of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and is on the Editorial Board of Inquiry.

Professor Buchmueller is a health economist whose main research interests involve the economics of private and public health insurance. He has done considerable research on the economics of managed competition, including several studies on the effect of prices on the health plan choices of consumers. He has also published several studies on the effect of employer-provided health insurance on the labor market decisions of workers and employers, the regulation of private health insurance, and the effects of public insurance expansions on public and private coverage.

ZHUN CAO, PH.D.
Zhun Cao, Ph.D., is the Associate Director for Methodological Affairs at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research, Cambridge Health Alliance. She received a Ph.D. degree in economics from Boston University in January, 2003. Her research interests are risk selection and its impact on mental health care services, insurance for vulnerable populations, and economics of health care disparities. Dr. Cao was awarded a Presidential University Graduate Fellowship at Boston University from 1996 to 2000, and the Robert Dorwart Doctoral Student Podium Presentation Honorary Title in 2002 from the NIMH. Her paper "Service -level Selection by HMOs in Medicare (joint with Thomas G. McGuire), was published in the Journal of Health Economics in 2003. Also, Dr. Cao is the Principal Investigator of a pending NIMH project on HMO Selection Incentives and Underprovision of MH Care.

YOONYOUNG CHO, PH.D.
Yoonyoung obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2005. She is currently an associate research fellow at Korean Development Institute. Her research fields are public economics, labor economics, and applied econometrics. In particular, poverty reducing policies have been her main interest. She has conducted research on welfare and public assistance programs in the U.S. Recent projects include an examination of child care subsidies on low income single mothers after the welfare reform in 1996 and an evalution of Wisconsin's SCHIP on low income mother's health coverage and labor market outcomes. She also pays attention to poverty reducing programs in other countries. Her studies include research on the effects of an educational subsidy program in Mexico and welfare programs in Korea. In addition, she is currently working on career and marriage decision of young women in the U.S., examining their incentives and responses to changes in environment.

CYNTHIA COLEN, PH.D., M.P.H.
Cynthia Colen is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the production and intergenerational reproduction of racial and ethnic health disparities, especially as they relate to women's reproductive wellbeing and perinatal outcomes. She is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University as well as a research affiliate of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. Dr. Colen received an M.P.H. (1998) and a Ph.D. (2005) in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan. Much of her research focuses on the extent to which upwardly mobile African American and White women in the United States are able to translate their newfound socioeconomic status into beneficial health outcomes. Another area of interest involves exploring patterns of reliance and sources of resiliency within extended kinship networks among members of marginalized populations. As a Health and Society Scholar, Dr. Colen is currently investigate the linkages between restricted returns to educational investments, residential segregation, and excess rates of morbidity and mortality among poor and nonpoor African Americans.

JULIE CULLEN, PH.D.
Julie Cullen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California , San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Spring of 1997, and served as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar from 1999-2001. Dr. Cullen's research interests fall broadly within the field of public economics. She has authored several papers within the economics of education, investigating the impact of school finance and school choice policies on students, families, schools, and other local government programs. Other studies analyze issues in the design of social insurance programs, such as unemployment insurance and disability insurance. Recent work describes how vulnerable populations fare when energy bills rise, and how cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes for low-income children are influenced by health insurance status.

SHELDON DANZIGER
Sheldon Danziger is the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Co-Director of the National Poverty Center, Research Professor, Population Studies Center and Director of the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. Danziger's research focuses on trends in poverty and inequality and the effects of economic and demographic changes and government social programs on disadvantaged groups. He is currently analyzing the effects of the 1996 welfare reform on the work and well-being of single mothers. He is the co-author of America Unequal (Harvard University Press, 1995) and Detroit Divided (Russell Sage Foundation, 2000) and co-editor of Understanding Poverty (Harvard University Press, 2002) and numerous other books and articles in refereed journals and conference volumes.

MATTHEW M. DAVIS, M.D., MAPP
Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He has developed a research program that focuses on the critical study of financing and delivery of preventive health services within the context of insurance status. He has a particular interest in the economics and practice of immunizations and obesity prevention, and in public policy that impacts the patient-physician relationship regarding these important preventive services. Dr. Davis has received extramural funding for his work from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, has served as an invited speaker for the National Immunization Program and the National Vaccine Advisory Committee. He has published his research in journals such as Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, American Journal of Public Health, and Pediatrics, and has received local and national honors for his research.

THOMAS DELEIRE, PH.D.
Thomas Deleire is Senior Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office and Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. From 2003 to 2004 he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and from 2002 to 2003 he was Senior Economist for labor, health, and education for President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. He was Assistant Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago from 1997 to 2004. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1990 and received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1997.

IRENA DUSHI, PH.D.
Irena Dushi, Ph.D., is a Research Analyst at the International Longevity Center-USA. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) in Prague (Czech Republic) in 1998 funded by the Soros Foundation. Prior to joining the ILC in 1999, she held a research fellowship position at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna (under a European Union fellowship program) and an exchange fellowship at the City University of New York. She has taught several courses in the Economics Department at Hunter College in New York.

Dr. Dushi is a labor economist with research interests in the economics of aging and health insurance. Since joining ILC, her work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Labor, Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, Boston College's Steven H. Sandell Grant Program for Junior Scholars in Retirement Research, University of Michigan's Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU), and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Care Financing and Organization (HCF) Initiative. Her current work focuses on employment-related health insurance demand by dual-earner households, disparities in the use of health services and health outcomes before and after the age of Medicare eligibility, and the demand for annuities. She has published work on the demand for health insurance in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, and on the design of employee benefits in a book entitled Benefits for the Workplace of the Future, edited by Olivia Mitchell et al., and published by the Pension Research Council.

JOSE J. ESCARCE, PH.D
José J. Escarce, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Senior Natural Scientist at RAND. Dr. Escarce graduated from Princeton University, earned a Master's degree in Physics from Harvard University and obtained his medical degree and doctorate in health economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Escarce has served on the National Advisory Council for Health Care Policy, Research, and Evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Advisory Committees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Minority Medical Faculty Development Program. He is past Chair of the Health Economics Committee of the American Public Health Association, and has served on numerous Institute of Medicine and National Research Council committees and panels. He was Deputy Editor of the journal Medical Care and is currently Senior Associate Editor of Health Services Research. Dr. Escarce's research interests include provider and patient behavior under economic incentives, access to care, racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, and immigrant health, and the impact of managed care on cost and quality.

SUSAN L. ETTNER, PH.D.
Susan L. Ettner is Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research in the UCLA Department of Medicine and in the Department of Health Services in the UCLA School of Public Health. Dr. Ettner obtained her Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. She was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Health Care Policy prior to joining UCLA as a tenured Associate Professor in 1999. Her research interests include reciprocity in the relationship between health and labor market outcomes, mental health and substance abuse services, insurance markets and managed care, chronic disability, post-acute and long-term care. Dr. Ettner was the 2001 recipient of the Alice S. Hersch New Investigator Award by the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy, given each year to the outstanding new health services researcher in the country.

Dr. Ettner's current research projects include analyses of the cost-effectiveness of a randomized, integrated patient-provider intervention to prevent harmful and hazardous alcohol use in the elderly; treatment patterns and their relationship to outcomes among managed behavioral health patients; the impact of provider reimbursement incentives on the quality of diabetes care in managed care settings; risk adjustment of behavioral health care costs in the VA and Medicare among dual enrollees; the cost-effectiveness of a self-care intervention for elderly minority patients with diabetes; predictors of health services and long-term care use among triply diagnosed HIV+ patients; longitudinal wage mobility among Californians; cost-effectiveness of a randomized, personalized motivational intervention aimed at reducing alcohol/drug use and psychological distress among orofacial injury patients who have alcohol/drug problems; the role of depression and medical comorbidity in work disability and the use of private disability insurance; the cost-effectiveness of a community-based intervention for Alzheimer's patients; a pilot study of provider financial incentives for improving the quality of depression care; and a policy evaluation of the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act (SACPA) of 2000.

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.

ARLINE GERONIMUS, SC.D.
Arline Geronimus is a Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. She is also affiliated with the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health. Dr. Geronimus received her doctorate in Behavioral Sciences from the Harvard University and did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Geronimus' research interests include structural and cultural influences on population variation in family structure and age-at-first birth; the effects of poverty, institutionalized discrimination, and aspects of residential areas on health; the collective strategies marginalized communities employ to mitigate, resist, or undo the harmful effects of poverty and structural racism on their health; and the perturbations public policies sometimes cause in these autonomous protections. Dr. Geronimus has worked with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the Detroit Mayor's "Dying Before Our Time" Task Force, and the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives to revitalize American cities.

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.

JEFFREY T. GROGGER, PH.D.
Jeffrey Gorgger is a Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Professor Grogger is an economist who has written on crime, on the economic consequences of teen childbearing, on the economics of education, and on transfer programs, among other topics. Much of Professor Grogger's recent work focuses on welfare time limits, which are among the most fundamental of the welfare reforms implemented in the mid- 1990s. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Policy Research (Cambridge, MA) and a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn, Germany). He serves as co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and sits on the editorial boards of Economic Inquiry and the Journal of Population 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.

JENNIFER HAAS, PH.D.
Dr. Jennifer Haas is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She is a general internist with a master's degree in health policy from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research interests include studying racial and ethnic differences in access to care and health outcomes, elucidating the complex relationship between the characteristics of an individual's social and physical environment, health care utilization, and health outcomes.

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.

MARJORIE HONIG, PH.D.
Marjorie Honig is Professor of Economics at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her research interests include worker and household decisions regarding employer-based health insurance and other non-wage compensation, the effects of Social Security and private pensions on labor supply, the evaluation of retirement wealth, and retirement expectations and realizations. She is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Board of Outside Scholars of the Michigan Retirement Research Center, and co-editor of the Social Insurance Research Network on Social Security, Pensions and Retirement Income.

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.

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.

HO JIN LEE, PH.D.
Ho Jin Lee is currently an economist with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. He continues to work with academics to finalize research that was initiated, while at the University of California, Irvine, as both a graduate student and a post-doctorate researcher. This research includes work in the fields of public health insurance and public assistance. He earned a bachelors degree from the University of California, San Diego.

PHIL LEVINE, PH.D.
Phil Levine is an associate professor of economics at Wellesley College, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Joint Center for Poverty Research. He has also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Phil received a BS degree with honors from Cornell University in 1985 and a PhD from Princeton University in 1991. He has been a member of the faculty at Wellesley since then. His research has largely been devoted to empirical examinations of the impact of government programs and social legislation on individuals' and firms' behavior. Topics include: (1) the impact of imperfect experience rating in the unemployment insurance system on firms' layoff behavior, (2) whether welfare recipients move between states because of differences in welfare generosity, and (3) the impact of abortion legalization on fertility behavior.

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.

ANTHONY T. LO SASSO, PH.D.
Anthony T. Lo Sasso, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Scientist in the Health Policy and Administration Division at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Lo Sasso is an economist and applied econometrician whose research spans several dimensions of health and labor economics and health services research. He received his doctorate in economics in 1996 from Indiana University, Bloomington. He is currently in the final year of a 5-year Independent Scientist Award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality studying workplace health benefits and how they affect employee health. As part of this broad research agenda, Dr. Lo Sasso has recently completed a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to examine the impact of an expansion of mental health benefits on cost and quality of care at a Fortune 50 manufacturing firm. In addition, Dr. Lo Sasso is currently studying the nascent consumer-driven health care movement and its potential impact on employer-sponsored health insurance and employee health. Other recent research has examined the effect of copayment levels on the use of employer-provided substance abuse benefits. Additionally, he has explored the extent of so-called “responsible purchasing” by employers: the degree to which employers collect and use non-financial information in selecting and managing employee health care plans.

Dr. Lo Sasso is also keenly interested in how government policies affect private sector decisions. He has studied the impact of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on uninsurance among children and the extent to which public coverage may have “crowded out” private coverage of children. He currently has a grant to study how community rating provisions in state non-group health insurance markets affect non-group health insurance coverage and uninsurance. Dr. Lo Sasso also has recently completed a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization initiative to study how the availability of safety net health care services affects the willingness of firms to offer health insurance and the willingness of employees to take-up health insurance when it is offered.

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.

THOMAS G. MCGUIRE, PH.D.
Thomas G. McGuire, Ph.D., is Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on 1) the design and impact of health care payment systems, 2) the economics of health care disparities and 3) the economics of mental health policy. Dr. McGuire has contributed to the theory of physician, hospital, and health plan payment. His current research includes application of theoretical and empirical methods from labor economics to the area of health care disparities. He has analyzed the reasons behind "discrimination" by doctors, and conducted empirical research to identify the contribution of the various mechanisms behind health care disparities. For more than 25 years, Dr. McGuire has conducted academic and policy research on the economics of mental health.

Dr. McGuire was the 1981 recipient of the Elizur Wright Award from the American Association of Risk and Insurance for his book, Financing Psychotherapy, and he has cochaired four NIMH-sponsored conferences on the Economics of Mental Health. He received the 1998 Arrow Award (joint with Albert Ma) from the International Health Economics Association. In 1991 he received the Carl Taube Award from the American Public Health Association. Dr. McGuire is a member of the Institute of Medicine, and a co-editor of the Journal of Health Economics. Dr. McGuire received his A.B. degree from Princeton and his Ph.D. degree in economics from Yale University.

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.

ALAN C. MONHEIT, PH.D.
Alan C. Monheit is Professor, School of Public Health, Department of Health Systems and Policy, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He is also a Research Professor at the UMDNJ Center for Health Economics and Health Policy and at Rutgers University's Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research and its Center for State Health Policy. He has held research positions at the Boston University's Health Policy Institute and School of Medicine and was also Director of the Division of Social and Economic Research in the Center for Cost and Financing Studies, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Dr. Monheit's research interests include the relationship between employment and health insurance, health insurance dynamics, the uninsured population, the distribution of health care expenditures, regulation of health insurance markets, and children's access to health care. He is an editor and contributor to Informing American Health Care Policy: The Dynamics of Medical Expenditure and Insurance Surveys, 1987 - 1996 and State Insurance Market Reform: Toward Inclusive and Sustainable Health Insurance Markets. Dr. Monheit received the first Administrator's Award for Health Services Research from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and is a Fellow of the Employee Benefit Research Institute and a member of the National Academy of Social insurance.

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.

HAROLD POLLACK, PH.D.
Harold Pollack is Associate Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He has published widely at the interface between poverty policy and public health. His recent research concerns HIV and hepatitis prevention efforts for injection drug users, drug abuse and dependence among welfare recipients and pregnant women, infant mortality prevention, and child health. His research appears in such journals as Journal of the American Medical Association, Medical Decision Making, Pediatrics, and Social Service Review. Professor Pollack has been appointed to two committees of the Institute of Medicine. He holds masters and doctorate degrees in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

STEVE RAPHAEL, PH.D.
Steve Raphael is an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1996. Raphael's primary fields of concentration are the economics of racial inequality, labor markets, and crime. Raphael has authored several research projects investigating the relationship between racial segregation in housing markets and the relative employment prospects of African-Americans. Raphael has also written theoretical and empirical papers on the economics of discrimination, the role of access to transportation in determining employment outcomes, the relationship between unemployment and crime, the role of peer influences on youth behavior, the effect of trade unions on wage structures, and homelessness.

MICHAEL L. SCHOENBAUM, PH.D.
Michael Schoenbaum (PhD in Economics, University of Michigan, 1995) is a health and labor economist at the RAND Corporation. He is currently leading analyses of the Palestinian health system, to identify policy options for improving clinical performance and economic viability; and he is leading economic analyses for several large-scale trials to improve care for depresssion. His research has included analyses of the costs and benefits of interventions to improve health care quality, evaluated from the perspectives of patients, providers, taxpayers and society; of the effectiveness of public health interventions, including infant nutrition, immunization, and community healthworker programs; of the social epidemiology and economic consequences of chronic illness and disability; and of health risk behavior, particularly cigarette smoking. Dr. Schoenbaum is also co-developer of RAND's Health Cost and Flexible Spending Account Calculators, web-based modeling and decision-support tools to help consumers make health benefits choices. Prior to joining RAND in 1997, Dr. Schoenbaum spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in health policy. He is based in RAND's Washington office.

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.

JAMES SMITH, PH.D.
James Smith (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1972) holds the RAND Chair in Labor Markets and Demographic Studies and was the Director of RAND's Labor and Population Studies Program from 1977-1994. He has led numerous projects, including studies of immigration, the economics of aging, black-white wages and employment, wealth accumulation and savings behavior, and the interrelation of health and economic status. He is currently a co-Principal Investigator for The New Immigrant Survey.

Dr. Smith was the Chair of the Panel on Demographic and Economic Impacts of Immigration (1995-1997), for the National Academy of Sciences. The Panel was convened to examine the interconnections of immigration, population, and the economy, and to provide evidence about the impact of immigration. Dr. Smith has served on the Population Research Committee at the National Institutes of Health. He currently serves on the NIA Data Monitoring Committee for the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and was chair of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Dr. Smith was the public representative appointed by the Governor on the California OSHA Board. He has received the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award, the most distinguished honor NIH grants to a researcher.

NEERAJ SOOD, PH.D.
Dr. Sood is an associate economist in RAND. He has extensive experience in doing health economics and health policy research. His prior work at RAND includes studying the effects of new HIV treatments on risky behavior among the infected and uninfected, evaluating the role of payment generosity on resource use for acute care patients, examining the effects of insurance on HIV related mortality and evaluating the role of price regulation in health and life insurance markets. He is also a member of an advisory committee helping the state of California evaluate policy options for financing and delivery of prescriptions drugs to low income HIV+ persons. Dr Sood's work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Health Economics and Journal of Risk and Insurance. Prior to joining RAND he worked in the Health Outcomes Evaluation Group at Eli Lilly.

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.

DAVID R. WILLIAMS, PH.D.
Dr. David R. Williams is the Harold W. Cruse Collegiate Professor of Sociology, Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research, Professor of Epidemiology, and Faculty Associate in the Program for Research on Black Americans and the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale University, and Associate Professor of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Williams' research has focused on social influences on health and he is centrally interested in the trends and determinants of socioeconomic and racial differences in mental and physical health. He is the author of more than 100 scholarly papers in scientific journals and edited collections and his research has appeared in leading journals in sociology, psychology, medicine, public health and epidemiology. He has served on the editorial board of 6 scientific journals and as a reviewer for more than 40 others. In 1995, he received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and in 2001, he was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Williams has served on the Department of Health and Human Services' National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (and chair of its subcommittee on Minority and Other Special Populations), and the National Science Foundation's Board of Overseers for the General Social Survey. He has also held elected and appointed positions in professional organizations, such as the American Sociological Association and the American Public Health Association. Currently, he is on the board of directors of Academy Health and a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care and also serves on its Panel on Race, Ethnicity and Health in Later Life.

BARBARA WOLFE, PH.D.
Barbara Wolfe is a Professor in the departments of Economics, Population Health Sciences, and Lafollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also an affiliate and past director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1977. Her current research projects focus on health economic, in particular, child health, persons with disabilities, and the tie between health, race, income, and wealth. Professor Wolfe is particularly interested in vulnerable populations such as those in poor families. Her recent research has included exploring the adequacy of resources of new retirees and of persons with disabilities, the association of income and wealth with health, who obtains employer based health insurance, and the impact of welfare reform on maintaining health care coverage. She has published extensively in economics journals and serves on the board of a number of professional organizations. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

AARON YELOWITZ, PH.D.
Dr. Aaron Yelowitz is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at University of Kentucky. He also is a joint faculty member in the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at University of Kentucky. He is also a Research Associate at National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at the Joint Center for Poverty Research, and a Research Associate at Institute for Research on Poverty, and the economics department liaison for the UK Center for Poverty Research. He serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Public Economics.

Dr. Yelowitz received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1994, and has previously worked at UCLA as an assistant professor. He has received funding from the Association for Public Policy and Management, the Economic Research Initiative for the Uninsured, the National Academy of Science, Employment Policies Institute, Social Security Administration, the Joint Center for Poverty Research, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His publications focus on the economic consequences of Medicaid, public housing, SSI, WIC, Food Stamps, and AFDC/TANF. Many of the papers focus on the linkages between different poverty alleviation programs, such as the disincentives to leave AFDC because of the loss of Medicaid health insurance. He has published articles in the Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Economic Inquiry and Pediatric Neurology. He has refereed for more than 25 peer-reviewed publications, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has presented his research in more than 50 academic settings, including MIT, Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, and National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dr. Yelowitz has taught graduate classes on public economics and health economics, and undergraduate classes on labor economics, public economics, and poverty and welfare programs. Many of his research papers appear on the graduate syllabi for labor economics, public finance, and health economics at major economics departments throughout the country.

Dr. Yelowitz's most recent work focuses on the impacts of living wage mandates and health insurance mandates. He has presented his living wage research at the American Economic Association meetings, to the City of Atlanta Living Wage Commission, and to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He has also testified as an expert witness in the Santa Fe Living Wage trial. His most recent living wage study is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journal Economic Development Quarterly.