Biosketches - Welfare, Medicaid, and SCHIP

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARY E. HARRINGTON, M.P.P.
Mary Harrington is a Research Investigator for the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU). In addition to translating research findings for policy audiences, she oversees ERIU's research agenda on vulnerable populations and is conducting research on coverage dynamics for low income children and families. Prior to joining ERIU, Ms. Harrington was a Senior Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR), where her research focused on Medicaid, managed care, child health and safety-net programs and providers. While at MPR, she participated in several national evaluations of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and related Medicaid outreach and enrollment efforts. Ms. Harrington received her Masters in Public Policy from the University of Michigan and is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in Health Services Organization and Policy at the University.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

JESSICA VISTNES, PH.D.
Jessica Vistnes is a Senior Economist in the Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Her research focuses on Employment-related health insurance coverage, the health insurance status of the U.S. population, the demand for Medigap insurance, and children's health care utilization. Her publications have appeared in Health Affairs, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Inquiry, the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, the National Tax Journal, Medical Care and Medical Care Research and Review. She joined AHRQ in 1989 after receiving a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

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.