Speakers: NBER Coordinating Center on the Economics of AD/ADRD Prevention, Treatment, and Care Annual Meeting

Louis Block Professor of Public Health Sciences and Department of Medicine, Section of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, at the University of Chicago

R. Tamara Konetzka, PhD, is the Louis Block Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Medicine, Section of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine. Konetzka is an internationally recognized expert in the health economics of long-term and post-acute care. Her research focuses on the incentives created by health care policy, including payment policy, and their effects on quality of care. She has led numerous federally funded research projects employing state-of-the-art econometric designs and mixed methods. This body of work has led to significant advances in knowledge of the drivers of nursing home quality, how public reporting of quality changes the behavior of providers and consumers, and the unintended consequences of home-based long-term and post-acute care. Konetzka currently serves on several editorial boards, as Editor in Chief of Medical Care Research and Review, and as an appointed member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC).

Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics, Department of Economics and Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University | Research Associate, NBER | Co-director, NBER Center for Aging and Health Research

David Cutler has developed an impressive record of achievement in both academia and the public sector. He served as Assistant Professor of Economics from 1991 to 1995, was named John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences in 1995, and received tenure in 1997. He is currently the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics and was named Harvard College Professor in 2014 until 2019. Professor Cutler holds secondary appointments at the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health. Professor Cutler was associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences from 2003-2008. He is currently acting as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences.

Honored for his scholarly work and singled out for outstanding mentorship of graduate students, Professor Cutler's work in health economics and public economics has earned him significant academic and public acclaim. Professor Cutler served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration and has advised the Presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley, John Kerry, and Barack Obama, as well as being Senior Health Care Advisor for the Obama Presidential Campaign. Currently, Professor Cutler is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He advises many companies and groups on health care. Professor Cutler was a key advisor in the formulation of the recent cost control legislation in Massachusetts and was a member of the Health Policy Commission created to help reduce medical spending in that state.

Professor Cutler is author of three books, several chapters in edited books, and many published papers on the topics of health care and other public policy topics. Author of Your Money Or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System, published by Oxford University Press, this book, and Professor Cutler's ideas, were the subject of a feature article in the New York Times Magazine, The Quality Cure, by Roger Lowenstein. Cutler recently completed a book, Survival of the City: The Future of Urban Life in an Age of Isolation (with Edward Glaeser), examining how cities need to and can adapt to pandemics and other threats. Professor Cutler received an AB from Harvard University (1987) and a PhD in Economics from MIT (1991).

Cardiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital | Professor, Washington University School of Medicine and School of Public Health | Co-director, Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy and Economics Research | Co-director, NBER Center for Aging and Health Research

Dr. Joynt Maddox is a health services and health policy researcher with expertise in quality and outcomes measurement, value-based and alternative payment models, and health equity. She has authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, and has received federal and foundation grants focused on issues in health policy. She served from 2014-2016 as Senior Advisor in the Office of Health Policy in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. She previously served as the Associate Editor for health policy at the Journal of the American Medical Association, and is currently the incoming Executive Editor for Circulation. She has served on committees related to quality measurement and payment reform with the National Quality Forum, American College of Cardiology, and American Heart Association.

Research Professor of Economics, Professor at the Geisel School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Dartmouth College | Research Associate, Director of the Program on the Economics of Aging at NBER

Jonathan Skinner is a research professor in Economics at Dartmouth College and a professor at the Geisel School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He is director (until September 2026) of the Economics of Aging Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Skinner received a PhD in Economics from UCLA and a BA in economics and political science from the University of Rochester.

Senior Economist, RAND Corporation

Péter Hudomiet is a senior economist at RAND. His research interests include applied econometrics, labor economics, economics of aging, and health economics. Most recently, he has published papers about trends and inequalities in mortality, health, and the prevalence of dementia in the United States; the age profile of life satisfaction after age 65; the effect of technological change on retirement; subjective and objective job demands at older ages; and the impact of psychological factors and personality traits on retirement outcomes. He is currently researching the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cognitive health and mortality of the older US population, the impact of job characteristics on dementia, and the accuracy of dementia classifications in Medicare data. He is also developing a novel probabilistic approach to classify dementia status in Medicare data. Hudomiet holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan, an MA in economics from the Central European University, and an MSc in computer science from the Budapest University of Technology.

Research Scientist, USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics

Victoria Shier, PhD, MPA is a Research Scientist at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. She is the principal investigator of an NIA-funded R01 examining how Medicare Advantage affects healthcare use and outcomes among beneficiaries with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and she is a co-investigator on a related study of the broader Medicare population. Other work has included analyses of nursing home assessment (MDS) and electronic medical record data from a randomized controlled trial involving 80 nursing homes. Dr. Shier’s work also examines the role of neighborhood conditions in shaping health, including as principal investigator of an NCI-funded R01 studying how the redevelopment of a public housing community in Los Angeles affects residents’ health and well-being.

Assistant Professor, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business | Faculty Research Fellow, NBER |Research Associate, Institute for Fiscal Studies

Yunan Ji is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Her research focuses on health care markets and studies how government regulation and market incentives influence firm behavior, and how strategic firm behavior informs optimal market design. Her work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her studies have been cited by Bloomberg, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. Ji received her PhD in Health Policy & Economics from Harvard University in 2022.

Associate Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin–Madison | Research Associate, NBER | Nonresident Senior Fellow, Economics Studies, Brookings Institution.

Corina Mommaerts is an associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is affiliated with the Economics of Aging, Public Economics, and Health Economics programs, and a nonresident senior fellow in the Economics Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on the design of insurance against risks over the life course, particularly risks related to health and aging. Recent and on-going work on ADRD include a project on the effects of Medicaid managed care for individuals with ADRD, a project on the health effects of expanded long-term care benefits for individuals with cognitive limitations in Germany, and a review article on the economics of ADRD. Her work has been published in top economics journals, including Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Economic Literature, and her research has been supported by grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Social Security Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. She received her BA from the University of Michigan and her PhD in economics from Yale University, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Economist and Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing

Eric Slade, PhD, is an economist and Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. Dr. Slade’s research uses administrative health care datasets to study the effects of innovative health care delivery models and health policies. In prior work, he has studied the impact of 24-hour team-based mobile psychiatric care on inpatient hospital use by Veterans, the impacts of Medicaid wraparound care on residential care readmissions among children with severe emotional disturbance, and the impacts of hospital staffing on the length of emergency department visits for persons with dementia. Dr. Slade currently leads an NIA-sponsored research study, Health Care Access, Quality, and Outcomes among Individuals with Dementia in Dually Eligible Special Needs Plans (D-SNPs), which is using linked Medicare-Medicaid data to compare care access and outcomes among dually eligible Medicare-Medicaid beneficiaries in integrated and non-integrated D-SNPs.

Florida State University

Rebekah Carpenter is a Research Faculty at the Claude Pepper Center at Florida State University. Her research examines health and wellbeing across the life course, with particular emphasis on how work-related factors, such as occupational exposure, shape health trajectories and financial security in mid-life and later adulthood. Her recent work focuses on the cumulative physical and economic consequences of work environments. She has extensive expertise in developing complex data linkages that integrate occupational information with population-based surveys, including publicly available data products for the Health and Retirement Study.

Associate Professor, Economics Department and Faculty Associate at the Aging Studies Institute, Syracuse University | Research Associate, NBER

Yulya Truskinovsky is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department and a Faculty Associate at the Aging Studies Institute. Her research interests fall at the intersection of labor, aging, and health economics, with a particular emphasis on long term care and the economics of caregiving. Her interdisciplinary research agenda has been supported by grants from federal agencies including the National Institutes of Aging and nonprofits such as the Sloan Foundation. Dr. Truskinovsky earned her PhD from Duke University in 2016. Prior to joining Syracuse University, she served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Wayne State University.

Associate Research Professor, Duke University

Arseniy Yashkin is an Associate Research Professor at Duke University whose research sits at the intersection of aging, health, and economics. His work examines how health trajectories in later life shape care needs, medical spending, and long-term care utilization, with a particular focus on Alzheimer's disease and multimorbidity. Drawing on large-scale population data, he develops improved projections of health and fiscal outcomes to inform policy decisions related to Medicare, Medicaid, and aging populations.

Principal Investigator, NBER Coordinating Center on the Economics of AD/ADRD

Rhoda Au is Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Neurology, Medicine & Epidemiology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and School of Public Health, and one of the PIs of the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program, where she is Director of Neuropsychology. She is also part of the Diagnostics Accelerator, which strives to fast-track the development of accessible and non-invasive tools to revolutionize AD diagnosis and treatment. She is Director of Global Cohort Development for the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative. Her research on cognitive aging and dementia focuses on using technology to develop a multi-sensory brain health monitoring platform that is customizable, technology agnostic, and scalable to allow for broad global representation in AD research.

Principal Investigator, NBER Coordinating Center on the Economics of AD/ADRD

Julie Bynum is the Margaret Terpenning Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and Director of the NIA-funded Center to Accelerate Population Research in Alzheimer’s (CAPRA). She is also PI on an R01 studying healthcare patterns across the full spectrum of cognitive decline in a racially diverse population, and on a state contract studying provision of long-term services in nursing homes and Medicaid waivers. She has been an Atlantic Philanthropies Health & Aging Policy Fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine Forum on Aging, Disability and Independence. She received her medical and public health degrees from Johns Hopkins, did her residency at Dartmouth, and completed Geriatric Medicine specialty training at Johns Hopkins.

Principal Investigator, NBER Coordinating Center on the Economics of AD/ADRD

Kathleen McGarry is the Chair of the Economics Department at UCLA. She is a leading scholar in the study of long-term care expenditures, caregiving relationships and burdens within families. She is currently the Director of the NBER project on Alzheimer’s Disease and Approaches to Long-Term care in the United States and Around the World. She previously served as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and has had fellowships from the Brookdale Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focus is on elderly well-being in relation to public and private transfers (i.e., Medicare and SSI programs) and resource transfer within families.

Meet Our Speakers

R. Tamara Konetzka, PhD

David Cutler, PhD

Karen Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH

Jon Skinner

Péter Hudomiet, PhD

Brian McGarry, PhD

Victoria Shier, PhD, MPA

Yunan Ji, PhD

Corina Mommaerts, PhD

Eric Slade, PhD

Rebekah Carpenter

Yulya Truskinovsky, PhD

Arseniy Yashkin, PhD

Rhoda Au, PhD

Julie Bynum, MD

Kathleen McGarry, PhD