Research
Research
Working Papers
Included To Be Excluded: Accountability Pressure and Students in Special Education
Job Market Paper
This study examines how schools respond to accountability pressures to students with disabilities and how such strategic responses affect students' long-term outcomes. Using a unique statewide reform in Texas that incorporated students in special education into the school accountability ratings and administrative data for all public schools in Texas, I find that schools responded to the reform by granting mass test exemptions to students in special education as a means of safeguarding their ratings. The weakest students were more likely to be removed. Cohort-level analyses show that this led to negative long-term outcomes such as less high school graduation and employment in adulthood. These results indicate that poorly designed school incentives could yield unintended school behaviors and, consequently, negative impacts on students that were intended to be helped, even in the long run.
Enduring Pain: Effect of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Over-the-Counter Pain Medication Purchases
Over-the-counter (OTC) medications are pharmaceuticals that consumers can access without prescriptions from healthcare providers. Although they serve as a major input for self-treatment by disadvantaged patients, little is known about interactions between insurance coverage and OTC drug use. I study how the expansion in public health insurance eligibility affects local OTC pain medication sales by leveraging the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion in 2014 with a rich retail scanner dataset. A difference-in-differences framework interacted with a treatment dosage measure showed that 1 percent point increase in initial share of uninsured population eligible to expanded Medicaids leads to 0.4 percent reduction in sales of OTC oral pain medications after Medicaid expansion. This result, combined with previous literature, suggests that new health insurance benefits could have induced patients to substitute to more professional healthcare from self-medication with OTC drugs.
Publications
Optimal Wage Contracts under Reference-Dependent Preferences
Journal of Economic Theory and Econometrics, 54, March 2021. (with Jaeok Park)
Works In Progress
Impact of PDMP Mandates on Patients' Pain Management
Recent ongoing opioid epidemic of U.S. led many state governments to reinforce existing Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP). While previous literature has examined its direct impact on a number of outcomes including opioid prescriptions and spillover effects to illegal substances, how patients have legally complemented the opioid tapering has not been studied. In this paper, I explore how mandated PDMPs (MA-PDMPs) in response to the opioid crisis have affected utilization of other pain management options such as non-opioid pain reliever prescriptions and Over-The-Counter (OTC) pain medication purchases. Despite guidelines from CDC and state governments that recommend prescribers to give non-opioid prescriptions after opioid tapering, I find no evidence of change in prescriptions of those substances. Instead, patients seem to have substituted toward OTC pain medications, which showed significant increases in sales, especially of drugs marketed for patients with chronic pain.
Does Financial Distress Make Hospitals Unethical? : Evidence From ACA Medicaid Expansion and Medicare Upcoding
(With Kiyea Jin)