James Okun

Hi, I'm James! I'm a fifth-year PhD candidate in economics at MIT. I study industrial organization and public economics. I do empirical work to better understand how to design policy in markets with externalities and asymmetric information.

Cambridge, MA

jokun@mit.edu CV Google Scholar GitHub

Working papers

Racial Differences in Nursing Home Value Added
with Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Neale Mahoney
Revise and resubmit, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics

+ Abstract

We use detailed data on the evolution of health for about 0.8 million Black and 5.4 million white nursing home patients covered by Medicare between 2011 and 2019 to estimate race-specific value-added measures for more than 8,000 nursing homes in the United States. We estimate that the average nursing home value-added experienced by Black patients is about 30% lower than that received by white patients. Most of this gap reflects differences in value-added experienced by similar Black and white patients within the same nursing home, rather than differences in value-added across the nursing homes they go to.

Work in progress

Public Procurement and Private Product Distribution: Evidence from WIC
with Yuci Zhou
Draft coming soon

Procuring Resilience: Theory and Evidence
with Andrew Komo
Draft coming soon

Selective Admissions in Nursing Homes: Evidence from a Randomized Audit Study
with Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Jesse Gubb, and Neale Mahoney
Draft coming soon

Publications

Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from U.S. School Districts
with Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, and Emily Oster
American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

+ Abstract + Press coverage

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020–2021 school year on students' pass rates on standardized tests in grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an average of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 in English language arts (ELA). Focusing on within-state, within-commuting zone variation in schooling mode, we estimate that districts with full in-person learning had significantly smaller declines (13.4 pp in math, 8.3 in ELA). The value to in-person learning was larger for districts with larger populations of Black students.

Resources

Crash Course on the Basics of Programming, Replication, and Numerical Methods

Agentic Coding For Economics Research repo

Other work

The Effect of Transparency on Political Behavior: Evidence from the U.S. Congressional Press Galleries
Awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award from the Economics Department at Brown University, May 2020