Jeremy Barofsky

I am a second-year doctoral student in health economics at Harvard University, School of Public Health. My interests include the connection between economic development, health, and social institutions. I am also interested in the evolution of norms and institutions to promote income improvements. Although I worked for a few years in heath systems performance, I come from an economics background. In a previous life (during undergrad) I spent a summer at SFI working on a stock market computer simulation with Doyne Farmer. For dissertation research, I am pursuing a project to quantify how health insurance changes savings behavior and the impact of health shocks on a household’s probability of falling into poverty.

At CSSS, I’m hoping to gain greater insight into agent-based simulation and evolutionary game theory. I am also looking forward to collaborations with other students and the project component of the school.

I’d be happy to discuss economic development literature and models and its connection to public health as well as teach microeconomics courses.

One reason I wanted to come to Santa Fe was because I think the economic development process (especially the way in which income and health mutually reinforce each other) occurs in a nonlinear way. Any project that focused this health-wealth link would be interesting to me. One specific idea would be to model the impact of infectious disease spread, changes to income, and a person’s ability to avoid future ill-health. The model could investigate whether and how these dynamics produce poverty traps.