Kathleen Mullen (Ph.D. University of Chicago 2005) is an Economist at RAND. She
joined RAND in 2007 after completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard
University through the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program.
Her research interests include applied microeconomics, econometrics, and health
economics. In recent work, she has examined interactions between the Social Security
Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the labor market among disabled workers. In past
work she has estimated the effect of schooling on achievement test scores controlling for
endogenous schooling, which earned her and her coauthors the 2005 Dennis J. Aigner Award
for the best applied econometrics paper published in the Journal of Econometrics in the
previous two years.

Publications

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Can You Get What You Pay For? Pay-For-Performance and the Quality of Healthcare Providers" (with Richard Frank and Meredith Rosenthal), RAND Journal of Economics (2010)

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policymakers and private insurers as a tool...

 

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Toward a Culture of Consequences: Performance-Based Accountability Systems for Public Services (with Brian Stecher, Frank Camm, Cheryl Damberg, Laura Hamilton, Christopher Nelson, Paul Sorenson, Martin Wachs, Alison Yoh, Gail Zellman, and Kristen Leuschner), RAND Monograph MG-1019 (2010)

Performance-based accountability systems (PBASs), which link incentives to measured performance as a means of improving...

 

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The Effect of Schooling and Ability on Achievement Test Scores (with Karsten Hansen and James Heckman), Journal of Econometrics (2004)

This paper develops two methods for estimating the effect of schooling on achievement test scores...

 

Working Papers

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Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt (with Nicole Maestas and Alexander Strand), RAND Working Paper Series (2011)

We present the first estimates of the causal effect of SSDI receipt on the labor...

 

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What Explains the Gender Gap in Financial Literacy? The Role of Household Decision-Making (with Raquel Fonseca, Gema Zamarro, and Julie Zissimopoulos), RAND Working Paper Series (2010)

Research has shown that financial illiteracy is widespread among women, and that many women are...