Ellen Meara is a health economist known for her work modeling the effects of public policies and regulations on health care utilization, overall health, and economic outcomes. Her research often focuses on the impact of public policies and regulations on publicly insured populations in Medicare and Medicaid. Meara looks closely at the economic impact of changes to insurance coverage, payment strategies, and the implementation of care delivery innovations. Much of this work focuses on disabled populations, including people with mental illness and substance disorders. She has extensive experience tracking trends in medical spending over time and for different populations.

Jonathan Skinner is a Research Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, and a Professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Geisel School of Medicine, also at Dartmouth. His research interests include measuring productivity and efficiency in health care, and the savings behavior of retirees.  He is also the Aging Program Director at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Batten professor Molly Lipscomb has a creative solution to a public sanitation crisis—and a new vision for the center that’s helping to address it.

**This talk has been postponed and hopefully will be rescheduled at a future date.**
Oriana Bandeira is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research analyses organisations and labor markets in different settings. The links below group selected recent papers by theme, all other papers can be found on her cv and at Ideas. 

According to new research from Batten’s Christopher J. Ruhm, the federal government’s opioid grant funding structure favors the least populous states, which are not always the states with greatest need. In an op-ed for The Hill, Ruhm suggests several ways to improve the targeting of federal grants that aim to assist states with opioid problems.

In a new paper published in the journal Health Affairs, Batten’s Christopher J. Ruhm and co-author Bradley A. Katcher find that the federal government’s opioid grant funding structure favors the least populous states, which are not always the states with greatest need.