Jori Barash

I am a PhD candidate in the Economics Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

I will be on the job market during the 2024–2025 academic year.

My research focuses on industrial organization, labor economics, and market design in healthcare and higher education.

My job market paper investigates the optimal design of a menu of contracts for physician reimbursement.

View my CV: here

Email: joribarash@utexas.edu

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Experts can leverage asymmetric information to induce demand for their services, complicating the design of payment contracts. In healthcare, physicians are widely believed to induce excessive treatment under a piece rate contract ("fee-for-service”) and inadequate treatment under a flat-fee contract ("capitation"). A single contract that mixes fee-for-service and capitation payments may balance these forces for an average physician, but heterogeneous physicians plausibly have different socially optimal contracts. I study whether offering physicians a menu of contracts can improve welfare relative to a single contract. I first develop a model of treatment decisions, showing that welfare impacts are theoretically ambiguous and depend on the correlation between physicians’ altruism, cost of effort, and patient needs. I then estimate the model using administrative data on Norwegian primary care physicians and their patients. In this population, the status quo single contract is inefficient. Physicians prefer a menu and respond by spending more time treating patients without increasing aggregate expenditure. The increase in patient health is equivalent to 5 percent of expenditure, with the largest gains for older, chronically ill, and rural patients.

This paper estimates the effect of a physician’s number of registered patients ("enrollment”) on short-run treatment intensity in the context of Norwegian primary care. I instrument for enrollment with quasi-random administrative patient assignments. The estimated effect of enrollment is negative but small for several measures of treatment intensity. For example, with one new patient registration, the average physician spends 3 fewer minutes per month across incumbent patients. Descriptive evidence suggests that crowd-out exacerbates under-treatment. Crowd-out is larger among physicians who reach their stated capacity or initially work part-time. Drawing on a model of physician decision-making, this heterogeneity implies that capacity constraints dominate income effects in explaining crowd-out. With capacity constraints, increasing the number of physicians may more effectively reduce crowd-out than incentives for greater treatment per physician. Fixing physician supply, an alternative patient assignment rule could reduce crowd-out from administrative assignment by 86 percent.

Why Don't Graduation Incentives Work? Match Quality and Financial Aid Design (Draft Available Upon Request)

Recent policy changes limit the scope for university admission decisions to equitably ration spots. I investigate whether selective universities can instead use graduation-contingent loan forgiveness to allocate spots to the students who most benefit from attendance. Identifying variation comes from an existing loan forgiveness program that incentivized greater on-time graduation. Participants’ relatively high graduation rates appear to be driven by selection on ability into loan take-up rather than program effects. Exploiting a discontinuity from Pell Grant eligibility, I find no detectable effect of loan take-up on course load, course completion, part-time work, on-time graduation, or earnings. I also document how selective universities increase graduation more for some students than others. I incorporate selection on unobserved ability into a structural model of students’ college choice, loan forgiveness take-up, and graduation. Using model estimates, I show how a counterfactual loan forgiveness program could shift college choice, leading to greater welfare, statewide graduation, and demographic equity.

SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS

Targeting Aid During a Crisis: Speed, Selection, and Subsidy Design with Lauri Kytömaa

In times of crisis, means-tested government programs sometimes relax eligibility standards to deliver aid faster. With adverse selection and less time to screen beneficiaries, relaxed eligibility may increase expenditure on non-targeted populations and decrease pass-through to households from private intermediaries, with both mechanisms lowering efficacy. The tradeoff between speed and eligibility standards is motivated by the relatively untested premise that faster delivery meaningfully improves outcomes. This paper shows that timely subsidized modification of distressed mortgages could have further reduced U.S. foreclosures in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. We exploit a simulated instrument based on the spatial distribution of financial shocks. Using a dynamic structural model of servicers' modification and foreclosure choices, we characterize how the optimal modification subsidy varies with time from delinquency, servicer volume, and market conditions.

Experience Learning and Externalities: Plant-Based Substitutes

Environmental policy frequently subsidizes low-pollution products, but this approach can be relatively expensive given information frictions and ineffective given consumer heterogeneity. For example, plant-based meat has a lower carbon footprint than most animal products, but it is unclear ex-ante whether economies of scale are sufficient to spur widespread adoption. Motivated by reduced-form evidence of large changes in behavior after first purchase, I estimate demand for these products with a 10-year nationwide household panel, allowing for imperfect information about quality and rich consumer heterogeneity. I evaluate the effect of counterfactual vouchers and marginal costs on consumer surplus and CO2 emissions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, lower prices are unlikely to induce large-scale substitution, but offering vouchers to inexperienced households accelerates the pace of adoption. The averted social cost of carbon is twice as large as direct voucher costs.

Admission, Tuition, and Housing: The Relative Effects of Guarantees on the College Outcomes of Low-Income Students with Stella Flores, Matt Giani, and Richard Murphy [Supported by the Spencer Foundation]

Universities using federal funds are no longer able to consider race in admissions which limits the available approaches to promote diversity. University systems are increasingly turning to race-neutral policies like conditional offers of free tuition and guaranteed admission. We provide evidence that these programs have limited efficacy by exploiting discontinuities in eligibility at a large flagship university. Then, using a randomized control trial, we investigate the role of information frictions and lack of certainty. The trial targets high school seniors who are eligible for these race-neutral policies. The first wave of the study included 32 high-poverty schools, with 16 randomized to receive outreach that included proactive guarantees of free tuition, housing placement, and a housing scholarship. Results are preliminary and subject to change: relative to outreach alone, outreach with guarantees increased applications by 18 percent, admissions by 10 percent, and enrollment by 11 percent. Point estimates are larger for students with guaranteed admission. In a survey, we find that students at targeted schools overestimate net cost and have limited risk aversion. 

PRE-DOCTORAL PUBLICATION

Heuristic to Bayesian: The evolution of reasoning from childhood to adulthood with Isabelle Brocas, Juan D. Carrillo, and Niree Kodaverdian. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 159, March 2019. 

TEACHING

ECO 358R Supervised Research: Spring 2024 (originating instructor)

This course introduces undergraduate students to research methods with an emphasis on applied microeconomics, preparing students to write an excellent honors thesis and make an informed decision about economics graduate education. Biweekly 75-minute meetings mix short methods lectures (e.g., DiD, IV), collaborative work, and student presentations. Assignments include two replications of published articles and two original research proposals.