David Powell is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty. His areas of expertise include public finance, health economics, labor economics, and econometrics.
Powell's research examines shifts in the opioid crisis, the effects of tax policy on labor supply and health care decisions, and the role of health insurance benefit design. He has also developed methods to estimate quantile treatment effects and extended the use of synthetic control methods.
Powell earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Selected Publications
David Powell and Seth Seabury, "Medical Care Spending and Labor Market Outcomes," American Economic Review, 108(10), 2018
Abby Alpert, Bill Evans, Ethan Lieber, and David Powell, "Origins of the Opioid Crisis and Its Enduring Impacts," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(2), 2022 (forthcoming)
David Powell, "Quantile Treatment Effects in the Presence of Covariates," Review of Economics and Statistics, 102(5), 2020
David Powell and Dana Goldman, "Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection in Private Health Insurance," Journal of Econometrics, 222(1), 2021
Abby Alpert, David Powell, and Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, "Supply-Side Drug Policy in the Presence of Substitutes: Evidence from the Introduction of Abuse-Deterrent Opioids," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 10(4), 2018
David Powell, "Does Labor Supply Respond to Transitory Income? Evidence from the Economic Stimulus Payments of 2008," Journal of Labor Economics, 38(1), 2020
David Powell and Hui Shan, "Income Taxes, Compensating Differentials, and Occupational Choice: How Taxes Distort the Wage-Amenity Decision," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 4(1), 2012
David Powell, "Synthetic Control Estimation Beyond Comparative Case Studies: Does the Minimum Wage Reduce Employment?" Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 2021