Prof. Novosad, Charlie Rafkin '16, and Sam Asher Publish in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

In their paper, "Mortality Change among Less Educated Americans" Asher, Novosad, and Rafkin study U.S. mortality change over the last three decades. They develop an innovative measurement technique that solves a problem that has made it difficult to measure mortality change at specific education levels. They show that mortality changes, at constant education percentiles, can be bounded under minimal assumptions.

They find that the rise in middle-age mortality among non-Hispanic Whites from 1992 to 2018 was driven almost entirely by the bottom 10 percent of the education distribution. Drivers of mortality change differ substantially across groups. Deaths of despair explain most of the mortality change among young non-Hispanic Whites, but less among older Whites and non-Hispanic Blacks.
 

Charlie Rafkin is a PhD candidate in Economics at MIT, with interests in public, behavioral, and labor economics. He received an AB in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2016 and was a student of Paul Novosad. Charlie started working on the project that became this research paper with Professor Novosad in his senior year.