Associate Professor Illinois Gies College of Business Coeditor, American J. of Health Economics www.julianreif.com
“Two teams can find nearly the same fact. The paper with the higher general-interest ceiling may not have a dramatically more credible estimate. It may instead ask the estimate to do more.”
Jason FletcherHow to Write a Top 5 Paper: A Case Study open.substack.com/pub/jasonmfl...
"The most efficient way to fund ambulance services would simply be to pay for the option the way that options are normally paid for: with a premium, collected from everyone the service stands ready to rescue. That’s how it’s done in the rest of the rich world." davidoks.blog/p/why-americ...
Why American ambulance rides are so expensiveThe unfortunately botched economics of emergency caredavidoks.blogObservational evidence can be deeply misleading in health settings. In our study of workplace wellness programs, RCT and observational analyses reached opposite conclusions, despite having access to rich administrative data. www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/u...
Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise. (Published 2018)www.nytimes.comSaloniUnpopular opinion but if you're interested in the effects of a medical product, it's 'RCT or bust' for me. I can see the case for observational analyses when randomization isn't possible, ethical, or the condition is too rare or some other such thing, but there's no such excuse here.
“Elon Musk’s personal wealth has jumped to $1.3trn according to Bloomberg. Even if that was reduced by $1trn he would still be the world’s richest person.” economist.com/the-world-th...
Business | Jun 20th 2026 EditionThe world this weekeconomist.comNice review of John List's new book. Relatedly, for those interested in experimental methods, I'm a big fan of Gerber & Green's Field Experiments book: wwnorton.com/books/978039...
Field ExperimentsA brief, authoritative introduction to field experimentation in the social sciences., Field Experiments, Design, Analysis, and Interpretation, Alan S Gerber, Donald P Green, 9780393979954wwnorton.comDavid McKenzieIn today's blog, I read through all of @johnlist.bsky.social's new mammoth textbook on experimental economics. I highlight the parts I think will be particularly useful to development economists, including great chapters on ethics, DUAs, ... 1/2 blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
Thoughtful critique of the iPhone and fertility study
Karen Benjamin GuzzoCurious about the recent claims that the iPhone led to huge declines in births? @drjenndowd.bsky.social breaks down the analyses and brings some much needed skepticism.
SHESG submission deadline is June 15! Great health economics conference, highly recommended.
David BradfordThe Call for Submissions for the 2026 SHESG is now live. SHESG will be held on Oct. 9-10 at the University of Georgia. Submissions from all areas of health economics are welcome. The deadline for abstracts is June 15. See the call below for more details. Submit early and often!
Another reminder that undertreated high blood pressure has real consequences. A physician bonus tied to blood pressure targets led to fewer medication increases for patients with borderline hypertension, and those patients then experienced more heart attacks and strokes.
Claire BooneNew diff-in-diff paper in @jamainternalmed.com. We document some unintended consequences of a hypertension control quality metric and financial incentive -- one that's widely used in US healthcare. In the overall population with hypertension there were almost no impacts, but..
Submissions for the 2026 Midwest Health Economics Conference are due 𝐓𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟏. We invite submissions of full papers or extended abstracts. Conference held on Sept 24-25 at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Submit a paper or volunteer as a discussant: go.gies.illinois.edu/MHEC2026
MHEC 2026 Submission Formgo.gies.illinois.eduThe cost of winsorizing is highest when treatment effects are concentrated in the tails. Medical claims are the canonical example: interventions often move the right tail, so winsorizing imputes away the very variation that identifies the effect!
Paul Goldsmith-PinkhamI don't think there's much of a good justification to winsorize data -- almost all "robust statistic" approaches would point to either censoring or something else. Winsorizing is basically imputing data with very limited justification in order to maintain statistical power
Great feature of legalized kidney compensation is that it pays for itself "It would be financially feasible to pay donors quite generously without requiring recipients to pay anything at all. Donors could be paid entirely from the savings to the health care system by taking patients off dialysis."
Al RothThis morning the Washington Post published my op-ed online (scheduled to appear in print on Sunday). 800 words is hardly enough to explain why I think what I do...I could write a whole book about that (forthcoming Tuesday:) #econsky #academicsky #medicine marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2026/05/its-...
Aetna and Cigna have now both left the ACA market "Cigna said it lost money in the ACA business in all but two years since 2014"
Formerly Richard MayhewCIGNA is leaving the ACA markets for 2027 (reminder Big national multi-line carriers are typically the LIFO insurers for the ACA) www.wsj.com/health/healt...
I agree with all of these points. And learning continues well beyond the PhD program: I’ve learned far more economics as a professor than I did as a student. That ongoing intellectual expansion is a large part of what makes this profession so rewarding.
Paul Goldsmith-PinkhamMy friend is teaching to his Economics Ph.D. students and explaining why they should be interested in topics that are not in their subfield. The friend asked for statements about why learning from other fields is good. Here was my answer: " Five things:
I expect that we'll soon see a full replication layer for empirical econ: every paper from the past 20 years systematically re-run, audited, and documented on a public website. Even for papers that used proprietary data, the code and methods will be stress-tested in public.
Ethan MollickI think that academia has not absorbed the fact that AI agents are now good enough to independently reconstruct complex papers without access to code or the papers themselves; just the methods & data. They aren’t perfect but the errors are often in the human paper, not the AI making a mistake.
Insurance isn’t the only way to smooth shocks, credit matters too. My new paper with Jaffe and Malani models insurance and borrowing jointly, showing they are substitutes: access to loans sharply reduces insurance value, cutting it in half for typical households. julianreif.com/research/rei...
julianreif.comAJHE is now online! Our social media editor, Anna Chorniy, will be posting summaries of our accepted papers.
ajhejournalNew! Price transparency was meant to lower costs. In a large NY RCT, it instead raised charges ~1% (driven by lower-priced providers with few out-of-network patients) with no change in patient behavior -- likely helping providers benchmark, not consumers shop. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
