Job Market Paper
with Damian Clarke
Abstract: Health care systems routinely face acute crises that disrupt services and threaten patient outcomes. In response, governments often deploy extra-budgetary funding to cushion these shocks—but how effective are such interventions in improving system performance and health outcomes? This paper provides causal evidence on the effectiveness of crisis-responsive health spending. We study a £700 million emergency “Discharge Fund” introduced in England in December 2022 to ease NHS winter pressures by accelerating hospital discharges in emergency care. Using newly assembled administrative data from ambulance services and hospital records, we find that targeted and agile spending can rapidly relieve operational bottlenecks and generate measurable health returns. Following the funding rollout, ambulance handover delays were halved and average response time for the most critical patients fell by 2.5 minutes, relative to levels immediately before the rollout. Patient outcomes improved correspondingly: the rate of return of spontaneous circulation upon hospital arrival rose by 4.2%, and 30-day survival increased by 3.6%. Mortality rates for all deaths also declined modestly in affected areas.
Publications
A Quantitative Review of Matching Papers in Economics: Evolution, Diversity, and Gender
with Climent Quintana-Domeque and Alejandro Robinson-Cortés
Forthcoming in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance
Replication package available on Harvard Dataverse.
Abstract: This paper reviews the evolution of research on matching markets in economics, using text analysis of RePEc data to trace trends in scale, diversity, and authorship. Since 1975, the share of matching papers has increased tenfold, accompanied by broader journal representation and a notable rise in Top-5 journals. Text-based clustering reveals a diverse internal structure, with distinct fields such as macro-labour, family economics, and market design emerging organically. Matching research featured early and widespread co-authorship, outpacing the broader profession until 2010. While gender representation has improved within the field, it still lags behind the overall discipline by about a decade. Cross-gender collaboration has increased in matching research, though less rapidly than in economics as a whole.
Work in Progress
Labour Regulation and Sex Selection in China
Education for Identity: Bidimensional Marriage Matching and Ethnic Preferences in China
Bidimensional Matching in Marriage and Stigma: Education and Smoking Among Koreans