Michael (Misha) Dworsky is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation. His research interests are in health economics, labor economics, public finance, and the economics of insurance. His work at RAND focuses on workers’ compensation, health insurance, disability, and health care utilization. Much of his work applies quasi-experimental research designs to large administrative datasets.
Dworsky has led numerous empirical studies on workers’ compensation claims and earnings losses due to workplace injury in the State of California. Recent or ongoing studies in this line of work have addressed topics such as COVID-19, post-traumatic stress disorder in public safety workers, and the long-term economic consequences of workplace injury. Dworsky also studies a range of topics in health economics, including the effect of minimum wage increases on employer-sponsored insurance and impacts of the Affordable Care Act on hospital utilization.
His current work involves using all-payer claims databases to study disability onset and transitions from employer-sponsored insurance to Medicare among non-elderly adults, and he is contributing to RAND's evaluation of the Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) Model Test in Medicare Advantage. He also is leading a study on tradeoffs between equity and efficiency when using rich consumer data in insurance pricing. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, American Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Health Services Research, among other outlets. Dworsky received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.
Selected Publications
Marika Cabral, Can Cui, Michael Dworsky , "The Demand for Insurance and Rationale for a Mandate: Evidence from Workers' Compensation Insurance," American Economic Review, 112(5), 2022
Michael S. Dworsky, Christine Eibner, Xiaoyu Nie, and Jeffrey B. Wenger, "The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Employer-Sponsored Insurance for Low-Income Workers and Dependents," American Journal of Health Economics, 8(1), 2022
Dworsky, Michael, Carrie M. Farmer, and Mimi Shen, "Veterans' Health Insurance Coverage Under the Affordable Care Act and Implications of Repeal for the Department of Veterans Affairs," Journal of Public Economics, 209, 2017
Dworsky, Michael, Nicholas Broten, How Can Workers' Compensation Systems Promote Occupational Safety and Health? Stakeholder Views on Policy and Research Priorities, RAND Corporation (RR-2566), 2018
Quigley, Denise D., Michael Dworsky, Nabeel Qureshi, Shannon Prier, and Courtney A. Gidengil, COVID-19 in the California Workers' Compensation System: A Study of COVID-19 Claims and Presumptions Under Senate Bill 1159, RAND Corporation (RR-A1430-1), 2021
Dworsky, Michael, Stephanie Rennane, and Nicholas Broten, Earnings Losses and Benefit Adequacy in California's Workers' Compensation System: Estimates for 2005–2017 Injury Dates, RAND Corporation (RR-A964-1), 2022
Gary Pickens, Zeynal Karaca, Eli Cutler, Michael Dworsky, Christine Eibner, Brian Moore, Teresa Gibson, Sharat Iyer, Herbert S. Wong, "Changes in Hospital Inpatient Utilization Following the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Coverage Expansion," Health Services Research, 53(4), 2018
Teryl Nuckols, Craig Conlon, Michael Robbins, Michael Dworsky, Julie Lai, Carol P. Roth, Barbara Levitan, Seth Seabury, Rachana Seelam, and Steven M. Asch, "Quality of Care for Work-Associated Carpal Tunnel Syndrome," Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 59(1), 2017