Date: 6/22/2022

Time: 12 pm to 1:30 pm Eastern, and then the next 10-15 years if there are more questions or anything requires clarification.

[EDIT: need to run now (1:30) but feel free to add more questions, will return around 4:30 pm]

[EDIT #2: let's try some more at 8 pm]

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I'm Jason Abaluck, a professor of economics at Yale University at the School of Management. Proof.

Most of my work is in health economics, especially trying to fix the problem that people can't tell which doctors, hospitals and insurers will (inexpensively) make them healthy.

A related research agenda seeks to relax the assumption that choices are well-informed and infer from choice data whether information, defaults, or other forms of "choice architecture" would lead to better choices.

I was an early advocate for masking and co-authored the only randomized trial evaluating the community-level impact of masking on Covid (of course, the benefits of masks fall as the Covid death rate falls due to vaccines, natural immunity, better treatment, and less deadly variants).

Other potentially relevant items:

• I just published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for mandatory gun liability insurance. The economic rationale is that premiums would act like an individual-specific tax on gun ownership which is (roughly) proportional to the size of the externality generated. I did not invent this idea, but I think it is underappreciated.
• I think there is a missing field in philosophy/economics -- "econometric epistemology" -- which tries to figure out what is true by estimating the causal effect of knowledge on beliefs. Thinking about starting it with a large-scale panel survey.
• I spent several years arguing with a belligerent 86 year-old man and his students about causal identification (a somewhat ironic result of my view that his work was underappreciated by economists). As a result, I believe I have the most highly-cited Twitter account in the Journal of Economic Literature (non-paywall link).
• I am not really the author of any books but 20 years ago I wrote a bunch of puns for the most prurient SAT study guide.

[EDIT: need to run now (1:30) but feel free to add more questions, will return around 4:30 pm]

[EDIT #2: let's try some more at 8 pm]

Edit: Thanks for the questions. I'll try to check back again tomorrow to see if I've missed anything. You can follow me on Twitter for more.