Teaching
Since joining Emory University in 2014, I’ve had the opportunity to teach several health economics courses, including a freshman seminar in health policy, an upper-level elective on supply-side health economics, a capstone course on research methods in health economics and policy, and a PhD course on supply-side health economics. Over time, I’ve migrated most of my teaching material to stand-alone websites for each class, each with its own GitHub repository. Links and brief descriptions for these classes are available below.
Econ 190 - Current Issues in U.S. Health Care
This is a Freshman Seminar focusing on current issues in U.S. health care. The class is organized around weekly podcasts and videos. This content helps to facilitate more detailed discussion throughout each class. I supplement this material with questions from students each week. I ask students to submit their questions in the first half of the week, and we use these questions to further advance our weekly discussions.
Econ 372 - Economics of Health Care Markets
This is an elective economics course focusing on “supply side” health economics. The course examines the industrial organization of health care markets in the U.S., including underlying theory, empirical findings, and related health care policy. We study insurance markets, informational asymmetries between physicians and patients, as well as issues of hospital pricing and payments.
Econ/HLTH 470 - Research in Health Economics
This is the capstone course for the joint major in Economics and Human Health. The course effectively combines health economics and human health content with data science. The course is therefore heavily applied in nature. Students complete an empirical research project using raw data and employ econometric methods to analyze a research question relevant to contemporary health care issues and/or health policy. The content of the course is split into three general areas: 1) data management in the real world; 2) health policy and health care institutions; and 3) empirical methods in program evaluation and causal inference. Each area of the course will be covered by way of an example research question, which is intended to help guide students in their own projects throughout the semester.
Econ 771 - Health Economics II
This is a PhD course in supply side health economics. This course explores the industrial organization of healthcare markets in the U.S., focusing on the following areas: hospital ownership and production, physician agency, quality and price disclosure, and hospital competition. If we have time, we will briefly cover some issues on health insurance markets. The class is effectively designed as a combination of empirical IO and causal inference, with applications to healthcare. As such, we will also examine several econometric tools and causal inference identification strategies. These methods will be introduced as needed throughout the course. Another goal of the class is to gain exposure to publicly available datasets for studying supply-side health economics issues, so we will work with several raw data sources throughout the semester.
Awards
I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredible students. I fooled some of them into thinking I’m an OK teacher/adviser, and sometimes they nominate me for things.
- Excellence in teaching, Phi Beta Kappa Society: Awarded to a faculty member “who has encouraged and helped students to excel, and who exemplifies intellectual rigor and enthusiasm for scholarly pursuits." Awarded: Fall 2019, Spring 2020