Aaron Schwartz

Looks like the ASHEcon 2026 conference agenda has dropped.

Warning: Don't take an early departure flight the last day, or you'll miss a session I'm really excited about.

Not 1, not 2, but 3 (!) papers using RDs to understand physician decision-making.

ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2026...

Great new paper in The Review of Economic Studies using randomized incentives to detect non-response bias, using administrative data to provide ground truth for comparison. While incentives increased participation, they didn't reliably reduce NR bias

academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Infant mortality increased following the Nazi expulsion of Jewish doctors, according to Helge Liebert and Beatrice Mäder in a new REStat paper!

Friends of AHRQ FY27 Appropriations Request Dear Chair Capito, Ranking Member Baldwin, Chair Aderholt, and Ranking Member DeLauro: To meet the needs of America’s patients, researchers, providers, and health systems, XX organizations call for…

The FY27 AHRQ organizational sign‑on letter is now open. We’re urging Congress to fund AHRQ at $500 million and ensure the agency has the staff needed to restart grantmaking and support core research. Organizations can sign here:

Congratulations!!

Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties | News | The Harvard Crimson Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year, relinquishing his University Professorship — Harvard’s highest...

Larry Summers to resign from teaching appointments, relinquish university professorship over Jeffrey Epstein ties

In 1937, sulfa drugs--some of the first antibiotics--were introduced.

This lowered childhood pneumonia rates.

As a direct result, kids with access to these antibiotics...

1 stayed in school longer,
2 had higher incomes, &
3 worked more/had fewer work limiting disabilities.

Antibiotics FTW!

The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE Until Elon Musk came roaring into the nation’s capital, Alan Cole was largely a plain-vanilla investor.

A tax economist put his entire life savings into a prediction market bet that DOGE wouldn’t cut spending.

His wife read the Kalshi comments from the people on the other side and grew *more* confident because “they didn’t seem to understand what they were buying.”

He made a 37% return

Dear lord I hope so

This is also my issue. But I’ve been amazed by how seemingly unpopular it is. Any op ed or Reddit post on this topic gets met with a torrent of “why don’t you love spending time with your kids?” Or “why do you want to endanger educators on the roads?” etc.

Caveat: your mileage may vary.

Kiddo made this for her first science fair. Keep at it, fellow researchers!

The joy of rooting for team USA is witnessing excellence through freedom. It’s not an accident that Liu’s skating style, her words, her family’s refugee story, all emphasize self-expression.

(What a blessing it is that the pursuit of freedom is so winning. Shed his grace on thee indeed.)

treatment standards. To the extent that health insurers implement policies that promote evidence-based medicine, they are addressing the key source of welfare loss in our second-best insurance environment.

One thing that fascinates me is that econs tend to take the information asymmetries as given and derive the optimal cost sharing. BUT, as a clinician, I’m more interested in policies that can reduce the information asymmetries. Medicine is not impossibly mysterious. We have diagnostic criteria…

Here is the paper link victoriamarone.github.io/files/Risk_P...

The health care consumption response to lower prices (moral hazard) represents both wasteful overutilization and valuable risk protection.

Optimal health insurance would transfer resources across health states without price distortions. But because health insurance benefits are not health contingent, the reduced prices are a key mechanism for resource transfer across states. Thus…

I am particularly excited about the Acquatella and Marone paper being presented. It formalizes intuition about the value of health insurance and problems with the traditional understanding of moral hazard…

Economics of Health Program Meeting, Spring 2026

The Spring 2026 Economics of Health NBER Program Meeting starts today, and it can be streamed on YouTube at the link below

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

NSF Update

Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.

Now by Directorate...

1/11

Oh no. My beloved Phillies are all in on hyperbolic, I mean, hyperbaric, oxygen therapy.

If you put an older patient in an MRI, you'll find about 80% of them have a rotator cuff tear. Most asymptomatic people have abnormalities on imaging. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Come work with me! I'm hiring for a post-doc position with expertise in health economics, to work on projects about healthcare markets and organizational form. Apply at academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31702

Real insane part of this clip is Hassett saying in the beginning that NY Fed researchers “should be disciplined” for…writing an economics paper that comes to a conclusion the president dislikes? A conclusion that matches the vast majority of economic evidence on tariffs? Nuts

ASHEcon is seeking abstracts on topics related to US-focused health economics for presentation at the 2027 Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) annual meeting.

Learn more 👉 https://www.cognitoforms.com/ASHEcon1/_2027ASSAMeetingCallForPapers

Please submit by April 30, 2026.

Continuity and Change in Trust in Scientists in the United States: Demographic Stability and Partisan Polarization Abstract. Americans’ trust in scientists has been stable and high, relative to other political and social institutions, for the last half century (Krause,

"Concomitant with the emergent partisan gap [in trust in science] is a massive perceptual gap among Democrats, who perceive a partisan divide more than double its actual size. Democrats vastly underestimate Republicans’ trust in scientists" academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

HHS Open Data Access official HHS datasets for research, analysis, and transparency.

New dataset dropped this month: national Medicaid provider spending (2018–2024), aggregated by NPI x HCPCS x month. Includes FFS, managed care, and CHIP encounter data. Public, 3.3GB, provider-level detail. Looks very useful for utilization & spending research
opendata.hhs.gov

This kid is going places.

Every viewing, this movie exceeds my expectations.