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

“Partisan Knowledge Claims in Congressional Oversight.” (with Kenneth Lowande).

Congress negotiates while uncertain about the effects of proposed policies, and often relies on committees to conduct oversight that reports about the past and project the future. Lit- tle is known about their conclusions, their accuracy, and how politics seeps into what they choose to report. We apply a typology of knowledge claims contained in congressional oversight, which classifies them based on whether they are prospective or retrospective, and whether they contain an inference. We use a large language model (LLM) to extract findings, evaluations, predictions, and recommendations from a new dataset of committee reports issued in the 103rd-118th Congresses. We argue that partisan investigation teams reveal more raw findings and make fewer recommendations, relative to bipartisan teams, which is consistent with their need to demonstrate they have acquired expertise. Our study pilots a general approach to studying the acquisition and sharing of information in legislative oversight.

“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.

Works in Progress

Mechanisms of Partisan Purchasing: Evidence from USDA Bids