UMBC Economics Department
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Item The Appropriate Division of Regulatory Labor(Springer, 2024-10-22) Brennan, TimothyShould national postal authorities or postal operators, experts in postal economics and policy, also become experts in estimating environmental costs and benefits? The alternative view is that there should be a “division of regulatory labor,” akin to the division of productive labor going back to Adam Smith. An environmental regulator can incorporate pollution and global warming costs across the economy, while postal authorities address postal policy goals taking the costs determined by environmental policy into account. A potential boundary between postal and environmental policy is pertinent also to national or transnational regulation of electric transmission and distribution grids. This issue has recently arisen in antitrust, as policymakers express greater sympathy for considerations beyond consumer benefit, including social equality and environmental sustainability. Employment and equity are arguably (and controversially) separable as well. However, there may be limits to the division of regulatory labor. Competition authorities in the USA have not been reluctant to expect other regulators in the USA to incorporate competitive effects in designing their regulations. Moreover, often sectoral regulators are expected to balance multiple policy considerations. One also needs to recognize that other regulations, such as climate-related carbon pricing, may not be in place.Item Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research(PNAS, 2024-07-29) Berkes, Enrico; Marion, Monica; Milojević, Staša; Weinberg, Bruce A.Despite the long-standing calls for increased levels of interdisciplinary research as a way to address society’s grand challenges, most science is still disciplinary. To understand the slow rate of convergence to more interdisciplinary research, we examine 154,021 researchers who received a PhD in a biomedical field between 1970 and 2013, measuring the interdisciplinarity of their articles using the disciplinary composition of references. We provide a range of evidence that interdisciplinary research is impactful, but that those who conduct it face early career impediments. The researchers who are initially the most interdisciplinary tend to stop publishing earlier in their careers—it takes about 8 y for half of the researchers in the top percentile in terms of initial interdisciplinarity to stop publishing, compared to more than 20 y for moderately interdisciplinary researchers (10th to 75th percentiles). Moreover, perhaps in response to career challenges, initially interdisciplinary researchers on average decrease their interdisciplinarity over time. These forces reduce the stock of interdisciplinary researchers who can train future cohorts. Indeed, new graduates tend to be less interdisciplinary than the stock of active researchers. We show that interdisciplinarity does increase over time despite these dampening forces because initially disciplinary researchers become more interdisciplinary as their careers progress.Item Predicting Hospitalization with the Hilltop Institute Analytics Research Team(UMBC Center for Social Science Research, 2024-02-12) Anson, Ian; Goetschius, Leigh; Han, Fei; Henderson, Morgan; Kim, Jean; Anson,Ian; Mallinson,Christine; Filomeno,Felipe; Kim,Jean; Moreland,D’Juan; Barnes,Amy; Ralston,MyriamOn today’s episode we hear from Dr. Leigh Goetschius, Data Scientist Advanced, Dr. Fei Han, Principal Data Scientist and Affiliate Assistant Professor in the UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Dr. Morgan Henderson, Principal Data Scientist and Affiliate Assistant Professor in the UMBC Department of Economics. Together, these researchers form the UMBC Hilltop Institute Analytics Research team. Our conversation focuses on their work in creating predictive models in the field of healthcare.Item Home Economics and Women's Gateway to Science(2024-01-26) Andrews, Michael; Zhao, YilingWe propose that collegiate home economics programs in the early 20th century introduced a generation of women to science, especially biology and chemistry. Using college-level data from the 1910 Commissioner of Education report and a collection of historical college yearbooks spanning 1900-1940, we document that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of women in home economics led to a roughly 3 percentage points increase in the share of women majoring in science. We demonstrate that the result is driven by exposure to science in the historical home economics curricula rather than through selection bias or faculty role model effects. By linking colleges to recent educational data, we provide suggestive evidence for the persistent impact of historical curricula decisions on modern day gender gaps in STEM fields.Item Site Selection Decisions for U.S. Colleges(2022-05-13) Andrews, MichaelThis manuscript describes how locations were selected for a large sample of U.S. colleges and universities. It is designed to serve as an extended historical appendix to Andrews (2022) and describes how the sample was constructed for that project. My hope is that this historical narrative detail on college site selection processes will be of wider interest to historians, education researchers, and other scholars.Item In the Interest of Full Disclosure: Consequences of the Grand Bargain in Patenting(2023-08-25) Pease, Marilyn; Andrews, Michael; Vasu, RajkamalWe consider a model where an innovator chooses how much to disclose about their invention before Cournot competing. More disclosure lets the follower copy more, but also signals strength and increases the innovator's probability of winning an infringement suit. We find policies that increase damages due to copying lead to universally more disclosure, while policies that increase winning probabilities induce less disclosure from large inventions and more from small inventions. We validate our predictions using two court decisions; one increased damages, the other winning probabilities. We conclude that some pro-patent policies are counterproductive, reducing disclosure for the largest inventions.Item Do Local Conditions Determine the Direction of Science? Evidence from Land Grant Colleges(2023-10-31) Andrews, Michael; Smith, AlexaHow should research resources be allocated across space to have the most beneficial impact on society? Prior studies suggest that scientists are influenced by the local ideas they are exposed to, and hence local conditions shape the direction of science. We investigate this hypothesis in the context of agricultural research, constructing a measure that quantifies the extent to which land grant colleges are located in counties that grow different distributions of crops than the rest of their states, which we call agricultural unrepresentativeness. Consistent with the prior literature, land grant colleges in more agriculturally unrepresentative counties produce research focusing on unrepresentative crops and create more geographically limited productivity spillovers. Because college locations are not determined randomly, these results may reflect endogenous sorting by state policymakers rather than causal effects of local agricultural conditions. We isolate exogenous variation in land grant college’s agricultural unrepresentativeness using historical college site selection natural experiments. When using only this exogenous variation, we find no correlation between land grant counties’ unrepresentativeness and the unrepresentativeness of agricultural research. To understand this null result, we investigate actions land grant colleges can take to overcome the effects of local agricultural conditions and find that colleges exogenously placed in agriculturally unrepresentative counties invest more in extension services to interact with more distant constituents. We conclude that local agricultural conditions need not determine the direction of science so long as researchers can take actions to obtain non-local information.Item Jue Insight: Beyond Students: Effects of University Establishment on Local Economic Mobility(2023-12-06) Andrews, Michael; Russell, Lauren C.How does the presence of a university affect local economic mobility and inequality? Existing work on universities' role in economic mobility have focused on students but have not examined the effect on local communities. We exploit historical natural experiments to answer these questions, using "runner-up" counties that were strongly considered to become university sites but were not selected for as-good-as-random reasons as counterfactuals for university counties. We find that university establishment causes greater intergenerational income mobility but also increases cross-sectional income inequality. We highlight four channels through which these effects operate: universities "hollow-out" the local labor market and provide greater opportunities to achieve top incomes, both of which increase cross-sectional inequality, while at the same time increasing educational attainment across the income distribution and fostering social interactions to high-socioeconomic status individuals, which both prevent inequality from perpetuating into intergenerational immobility.Item Improving American Retirement Prospects(2024-06-01) Wilschke, Peter; Kuruvilla, Arvind; Dyson, MatthewItem Immigration Attitudes and Labor Market Conditions in the United States(2024-03-22) Ayromloo, Shalise S; Firsin, OlegItem Does Section 230 Provide Platforms Too Much or Too Little Immunity?(Techology Policy Institute, 2021-07-07) Brennan, TimRead the latest work published by the fellows of Technology Policy Institute.Item Designing Optimal Recommended Budgeting Thresholds for a Medicaid Program(AJMC, 2022-07-14) Henderson, Morgan; Stockwell, IanObjectives: To develop and test a methodology for optimally setting automatic auditing thresholds to minimize administrative costs without encouraging overall budget growth in a state Medicaid program. Study Design: Two-stage optimization using administrative Maryland Medicaid plan-of-service data from fiscal year (FY) 2019. Methods: In the first stage, we use an unsupervised machine learning method to regroup acuity levels so that plans of service with similar spending profiles are grouped together. Then, using these regroupings, we employ numerical optimization to estimate the recommended budget levels that could minimize the number of audits across those groupings. We simulate the effects of this proposed methodology on FY 2019 plans of service and compare the resulting number of simulated audits with actual experience. Results: Using optimal regrouping and numerical optimization, this method could reduce the number of audits by 10.4% to 36.7% relative to the status quo, depending on the search space parameters. This reduction is a result of resetting recommended budget levels across acuity groupings, with no anticipated increase in the total recommended budget amount across plans of service. These reductions are driven, in general, by an increase in recommended budget level for acuity groupings with low variance in plan-of-service spending and a reduction in recommended budget level for acuity groupings with high variance in plan-of-service spending. Conclusions: Using machine learning and optimization methods, it is possible to design recommended budget thresholds that could lead to significant reductions in administrative burden without encouraging overall cost growth.Item Hilltop Researchers Awarded NSF Grant to Study Hospital Pricing Behavior(The Hilltop Institute, 2022-08-01) The Hilltop InstituteItem Transparency In Coverage: A New Tool For Promoting Provider Gender Equity?(Health Affairs, 2023-08-30) Henderson, Morgan; Mouslim, MorganeItem How New Data On Hospital “Discounted Cash Prices” Might Lead To Patient Savings(Health Affairs, 2021-11-08) Mouslim, Morgane; Henderson, MorganIn a new HealthAffairs blog post, Hilltop researchers Morgane Mouslim, DVM, ScM, and Morgan Henderson, PhD, describe their continued work on hospital price transparency. Mouslim and Henderson have been investigating hospital price transparency and the effects of the January 2021 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) final rule that requires hospitals to publish the prices of their services.Item The Price You Pay: Hospitals are posting procedure costs online, but consumers say price tags can still be hard to find(InvestigateTV, 2023-08-07) Molina, Daniela; DePompa, Rachel; Romans, PaytonItem One Year Later, Where Are The 'Transparency In Coverage' Compliance Studies?(Health Affairs, 2023-09-19) Henderson, Morgan; Mouslim, MorganeItem HCA doctors say its cost-cutting is endangering Appalachian patients — a warning for the whole U.S. health care system(STAT, 2023-11-30) Bannow, TaraItem Data Transparency(Incremental Healthcare, 2022-01-24) Terhayden, Nick vanItem The Utility of Data from Long-Term Care Assessments for Reducing Repeated Hospital Encounters among Medicare-Medicaid Dually Eligible Beneficiaries(2023) Fakeye, Oludolapo; Rana, Prashant; Han, Fei; Henderson, Morgan; Stockwell, Ian