In Conversation With Mark Duggan: Get to Know SIEPR’s 2020 Graduate Fellows

About the Speaker:

Mark Duggan is The Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and The Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor of Economics at Stanford. His research focuses on the health care sector and the effects of government expenditure programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. His research has been published in leading academic outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has been featured in many media outlets including The Economist, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Duggan was the 2010 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal (awarded once every two years to the leading health economist in the U.S. under age 40) and his research has been funded by National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Social Security Administration. He has testified about his research to committees in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives and he served from 2009 to 2010 as the Senior Economist for Health Care Policy at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He teaches "Econ 1" at Stanford and advises dozens of undergraduate and graduate students.

Featured students

Sarah Eichmeyer

Sarah Eichmeyer is a PhD student at the Stanford Economics Department. Her research is in health and public economics, with a special focus on low-income populations. She uses field experimental and applied microeconomics methods to uncover the economic, institutional and procedural roots of economic and health inequalities. She received a B.Sc. in Economics from Heidelberg University (Germany) and a M.A. in Economics from the University of Zurich (Switzerland).

Emilie Jackson

Emilie Jackson received her PhD from Stanford University in 2020, and BA from Stanford in 2013. She will be a postdoctoral scholar at the NBER for the 2020-21 academic year, and then start as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Michigan State University in Fall 2021. Her research is in the fields of public, health, and labor economics. In particular, her work has touched on the implications of major policy changes such as the Affordable Care Act, and the recent growth in gig employment opportunities (e.g. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit). 

Sean Myers

Sean Myers is an economist working at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, focusing on government default and solvency, public pensions, and asset pricing. He received his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2020. His recent work shows municipal governments' levered exposure to stock market risk and how poorer municipalities choose higher leverage, as well as how investor expectations of cash flows rather than discount rates explain the majority of stock market booms and busts. He will be a postdoctoral fellow at the NBER in Long-Term Fiscal Policy for 2020-21 and will join the Finance department at the Wharton School as an Assistant Professor in 2021. He received his BS from UNC Chapel Hill and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York prior to attending Stanford.

Jonathan Zhang

Jonathan Zhang is an empirical economist with research interests in health economics, public finance, and applied microeconomics.  He obtained his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2020 and did his undergraduate studies at UBC.  For the 2020-21 academic year, he will be a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University, and in 2021, an Assistant Profess of Economics at McMaster University.  He is also affiliated with the Veteran Affairs Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention.