2024 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award Honorable Mention: Christopher Hollrah

Christopher Hollrah, will be awarded an honorable mention at the 117^th NTA Annual Conference, on November 15, 2024 in Detroit, MI.

Chris received his PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2024. His primary fields are public finance and health economics. His research aims to understand how people respond to public program incentives, with a focus on disadvantaged groups. Chris’ dissertation, Essays in Health Economics, provides insight into how disadvantaged groups respond to health subsidies and cash assistance programs. He combines administrative data and causal inference techniques to answer several policy relevant questions.

The first chapter assesses how low-income patients near the federal poverty line prioritize prescriptions with high health benefits when their out-of-pocket costs for prescriptions sharply increase. The second chapter evaluates how higher costs of visiting a physician affect low-income patients’ access to prescriptions. The third chapter answers whether substantial cash-transfers at birth make up for some of the long-term disadvantages of poor health at birth.