Research

Publications

Peer-Reviewed

“Mothers’ Experience With Health Insurance Coverage When Youngest Child Reaches 18 Years of Age.” JAMA Health Forum, 2023 (with Eric Napierala, Sashoy Patterson, Ana Laboy, and Jessica Smith).

“Did Border Closures Slow SARS-CoV-2?” Scientific Reports 12:1709, 2022 (with Mary Shiraef, Paul Friesen, and Lukas Feddern).

“COVID Border Accountability Project, a hand-coded global database of border closures introduced during 2020 “ Scientific Data, 2021 (with Mary Shiraef, Cora Hirst, et al).

Editor-Reviewed

“Managed Care.” in The International Encyclopedia of Public Health, 3rd Ed., 2025 (with Sherry Glied and Katharina Janus).

“Impact of the Medicaid Coverage Gap: Comparing States That Have and Have Not Expanded Eligibility.” Commonwealth Fund, 2023 (with Sherry Glied).

Working Papers

“The Politics of Predicting the Future” (with Kenneth Lowande).

Congress negotiates with vast uncertainty about the effects of proposed policies, and so relies on committees to report about the past and project the future. Little is known about their conclusions, their accuracy, and whether politics seeps into their judgements. We introduce a typology of informational statements contained in committee reports, which classifies them based on whether they are prospective or retrospective, and whether they contain an inference. We argue that bipartisan teams tend to focus on the past to avoid disagreements inherent in predicting out-of-sample. Using a new dataset of committee reports from the 106th-116th Congress, we identify and classify summary findings, evaluations, predictions, and recommendations. We show that bipartisan teams are more retrospective and fact-based, while partisan teams favor predicting the future—without making actionable recommendations. Our results demonstrate politics drives partisan teams to systematically communicate less accurate (and helpful) classes of information.

“Consequences of the Medicaid Coverage Gap” (with Sherry Glied).

Nearly two million low-income Americans fall into the Medicaid coverage gap: they earn too much to qualify for Medicaid in their state but too little to qualify for subsi- dized insurance under the ACA, leaving them with no affordable coverage options. The existence of the gap is well-known, but there have been few systematic studies of its impacts. Using data from the 2011-13 and 2017-19 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveil- lance System (BRFSS) across 36 sample states (and, in sensitivity analyses, from the 2011-2019 American Community Survey), we study the effects of state Medicaid ex- pansion decisions on rates of health insurance coverage, having a personal doctor, and preventive service utilization among those who fall into the gap. We find that Medicaid expansion is associated with improvements in all three outcomes among those who would otherwise fall into the coverage gap (the potential gap population). We then examine the extent and sources of heterogeneity in these patterns. We find that the effects of expansion on the gap population vary in magnitude (though not in direction) across specifications and sample state selection. We find that hetero- geneity in effects is systematically associated with characteristics of expansion and non-expansion states included in the analysis, although the relationships vary across populations and outcomes. This heterogeneity suggests that analysts examining pat- terns across states should test for the robustness of effects across samples.