Jacob Wallace, assistant professor of public health (health policy), was part of the team that won the American Society of Health Economists’ (ASHEcon) 2024 Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for Best Research in Health Econometrics.
Wallace, whose primary research interest is Medicaid, was a co-author of the study Conditional cross-design synthesis estimators for generalizability in Medicaid, which was published in the journal Biometrics in December. The project was led by Irina Degitar of Mathematica in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sherri Rose of the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University. Tim Layton of the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School was a co-author on the study.
The award memorializes Manning’s contributions to the development and application of econometric methods in health economics by recognizing the best published health economics research in econometric methodology or econometric application.
Wallace said the project took five years to complete, and was built upon dissertation research he began a decade ago while studying for his PhD at Harvard, which he earned in 2016. The research, he said, leverages natural experiments in part of the Medicaid program to measure the causal effects of managed care plans on the cost and quality of care. The paper extends that work by developing new approaches to generalizability that combine randomized and observational data – “an important statistical extension with broad applications” – and applies them to estimate the causal effects of managed care plans in the full Medicaid population.
“I have been reading, admiring, and learning from the work of Willard Manning since I was a first-year graduate student, so it is a real honor to be part of the team that won this year’s Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for the Best Research in Health Econometrics,” Wallace said.
He added, “Winning the Manning Award is a big deal. ASHEcon is the premiere conference for health economists in the U.S., and the recent winners of the Manning Award are all intellectual leaders in the field of economics, such as Amanda Kowalski, Charles Manski, Francesca Molinari, Marcella Alsan, Ziad Obermeyer, Sendhil Mullainathan, and John Mullahy.”
Wallace and his fellow researchers will receive their award at ASHEcon’s 13th annual conference, which takes place June 16-19 in San Diego.