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!

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:

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!

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

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.)

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…

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

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.

"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-...

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

PSA: Regal theaters are showing Casablanca on the big screen today nationwide. If you haven’t seen it, check it out! It is hilarious, clever, touching, beautiful.

This tech and piloting talent has made for incredible viewing.

"As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market."

I love being a labor economist, where null is interesting if your model is still convincing. Anytime a student tells me they are worried they didn't find statistically significant results, I remind them of David Card. Two Nobel winning papers had null results (NJ/PA minimum wage and Mariel Boatlift)

Fascinating and intuitive. This post covers Glaeser (2003)-like misallocation losses over and above Harberger triangles. It also describes how small supply shocks can drastically tip allocations when prices can’t adjust.

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Federal government employment is down 324k since the start of 2025 amidst DOGE cuts—that's more than 10% of the Federal workforce The large drop in October was caused by many workers who had been on deferred resignation becoming officially unemployed

This event is today! There's still time to sign up if you want to learn more about the health economics job market in places outside of economics departments.

It’s been frigid for too many weeks. Time to throw on the cold weather classic.

we admit grad students based on their ability to learn existing knowledge, but recommend them based on their ability to create new knowledge. we can’t predict how a person will be as a researcher based only on their undergrad record #econsky #academicsky marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2026/02/inte...

Wow

Excited to share: the Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) Fund officially launched this week as an independent nonprofit. Coefficient Giving is proud to be an anchor funder. 🧵

One of the most important scientific achievements of the last 50 years was making the causal links between prior viral infections (e.g. EBV) and subsequent serious diseases.

This is an important issue I’ve come across in our research on denials. Most health insurer claims denials (according to their label at least) have nothing to do with coverage rules.

The Washington Post gutted the health team which I helped to lead despite our stories being among the most widely read, impactful and adept at reaching new audiences.

We have a new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine! Patient race is widely used in medical algorithms...but it's unclear how patients feel about this. We conduct the first nationally-representative YouGov survey to find out, producing four findings with practical clinical implications. 1/

My manuscript "The Economics of Noncompete Clauses" is now out in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Few topics have garnered more debate and policy attention over the last few years. This article brings us up to speed on the debate and the current answers. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

A non-journalist friend asked me — is losing 300 people from a newsroom a lot? I pointed out there are about 200 journalists at the Philadelphia Inquirer and about 100 at the Baltimore Banner. Imagine losing both those publications in a day.

"When researchers cannot specify and be transparent about what equity means in their work, it risks becoming an aesthetic rather than a commitment." Sharp piece by Choi et al outling several issues with contemporary research that have increasingly troubled me. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Evan Starr's new JEP paper on non-compete clauses includes some important discussion of physicians. Worth a read if you are interested in health care labor markets. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

There are phenomenal speakers. Sign up, students.

One week from today!

This made me weepy

#AHRQ federal employees by GS series using OPM data as of Nov 2025. Running an Agency with no finance, grant, IT, contract & comms Feds. All replaced by contractors and farmed out to other agencies. @firedbutfighting.bsky.social @standupforscience.bsky.social @donmoyn.bsky.social

Wow

Checks out

Doctors and researchers love papers about themselves almost as much as Hollywood loves movies about movies.

From my grandmother's story: "One by one our good decent teachers disappeared and instead Nazi teachers replaced them."

This is a really incredible piece. Share it widely 🎁https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/minneapolis-uprising/685755/?gift=C-rzmQ8PsUHt15odxTKJDn7xrpPNxSpotkNz_P27oI0