Research

Working Papers

Mis(sed) Diagnosis: Physician Decision Making and ADHD
[Conditionally accepted, Journal of Political Economy]

The mechanisms driving disparities in mental healthcare are not well understood. This paper develops a structural model of diagnosis for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), highlighting how patient and physician factors can result in disparities. Using electronic health record data, I estimate model parameters and decompose the observed male:female ADHD diagnostic difference of 2.3:1. Simulations show that only 46-55% of this diagnostic difference can be explained by underlying symptom prevalence, with the remainder driven by differences in diagnostic thresholds. I find that physicians view missed diagnosis to be costlier for their male patients, which I argue may have economic justifications.

The Role of Information in Pharmaceutical Advertising: Theory and Evidence -with Conor Ryan
[Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics]

This paper theoretically and empirically examines the role of information in the practice of pharmaceutical detailing (promotional interactions between drug representatives and physicians). We start with a theoretical framework in which pharmaceutical firms target detailing visits to physicians who potentially learn about drug quality and prescribe it to their patients. We derive several predictions about the role of information in these visits, which we then test empirically using Medicare Part D prescriptions and pharmaceutical detailing visit data. We find there is little empirical evidence to support learning as a primary mechanism of detailing visits and, in fact, document strong evidence to the contrary.

Anatomy of Covid-19 Hospital Quality: Determinants, Information, and Equilibrium -with Gautam Gowrisankaran and Robert Town

Between 2020 and 2022, the U.S. experienced 104 million Covid-19 cases and 730,000 deaths in hospitals, suggesting the importance of understanding hospital quality in managing Covid-19. Using Texas patient discharge data, we estimate the distribution and determinants of hospital quality and assess how patients account for it in their hospital choices. Within-hospital mortality, controlling for risk adjusters and selection, reveals substantial variation across hospitals. We find that Intensive care unit (ICU) capacity strain played a critical role in reducing hospital performance. Patient hospital choice estimation reveals that patients value hospitals with high baseline quality, but they did not account for capacity strain in their choices. In equilibrium, these hospitals' quality levels degraded, resulting in patients choosing worse quality hospitals than average. Counterfactuals suggest that accounting for capacity strain and weighting quality more heavily could lower mortality by 3.7%, whereas providing more precise information but not accounting for capacity strain would cause Covid-19 deaths to rise 7.9%.

Physician Practice Style for Mental Health Conditions: The Case of ADHD

There is a robust literature documenting the importance of physician practice style (e.g., the propensity to perform certain operations) in explaining outcomes related to patients' physical health. Yet, little is known about the role of physicians in explaining patients' mental health outcomes. This paper uses novel data on doctor note text together with natural language processing techniques to estimate and document heterogeneity in physician practice style for diagnosing Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). I find significant variation in both diagnostic intensity (the mean propensity to diagnose) and diagnostic compliance (the weight that physicians place on medical guidelines). I show that physician characteristics can explain some of this heterogeneity, with both female physicians and recent graduates having higher diagnostic compliance and lower diagnostic intensity than their respective counterparts.

Works in Progress

The Effect of Acquiring Health Insurance on Health Outcomes: Evidence from Turning 65 Using the American Communities Surveys from 2008 to 2023 -with Kristin Butcher, Luojia Hu, and Ryan Perry

Common Ownership Effects and the Market for Nursing Homes -with Anthony LoSasso and Aryan Safi

Missing Stars: Gender Differences in the Assessment of Gifted Students -with Beatrix Eugster and Aurelien Sallin

Publications

Journal Articles

Societal Disruptions and Childhood ADHD Diagnosis During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
-with Seth Freedman, Dario Salcedo, Kosali Simon, and Coady Wing
2023. Journal of Human Resources 59(S), S187-S226.
NBER working paper version <here>

Local Economic Conditions and Fertility from the Great Depression through the Great Recession.
-with Jessamyn Schaller and Price Fishback
2020. AEA Papers and Proceedings (Vol. 110, pp. 236-40) 

Nonparametric Estimation of Production Functions.
-with Trevor Collier and John Ruggiero
2016. Data Envelopment Analysis Journal 2(1), pp. 35-52.

Book Reviews

Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein: “We’ve got you Covered: Rebooting American Health Care”
2024. Business Economics 59, 190–192.

Software

GGT: STATA module to implement Geweke, Gowrisankaran, and Town Model Quality Estimator.
-with Gautam Gowrisankaran and Robert Town. Uploaded December 2019. Updated Version- September 2025.
Full Documentation- here.
Download Sample Dataset- here.

RESTING PaperS

A Re-Examination of Parental Divorce and Child Mental Health in the 21st Century -draft available upon request.