Assistant Professor
Boston University, Questrom School of Business
Faculty Research Fellow
National Bureau of Economic Research
Email: jetson@bu.edu
CV
You can view my CV here and my Google Scholar profile here.
Education
Ph.D., Economics, MIT 2020. Advisors: Jim Poterba and Ben Olken.
B.S., Applied and Computational Mathematics and Economics, Caltech 2014
Bio
I am an assistant professor at Boston University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER. My research addresses fraud, misreporting and overbilling in public expenditures, particularly in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, as well as the consequences of these behaviors for public spending and patient health outcomes. I am also interested in the detection and deterrence of fraud and corruption, as well as the statistical properties of misreported data. This work lies at the intersection of public economics, health economics, political economy, and law and economics.
I am an alumnus of MIT, Caltech, the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the Stamps Scholars program, The Masters School, and REACH Prep.
Working Papers
Can Whistleblowers Root Out Public Expenditure Fraud? Evidence from Medicare
Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics
Media coverage: ProMarket, Mondaq, National Law Review
Ambulance Taxis: The Impact of Regulation and Litigation on Health Care Fraud
with Jimmy Roberts, Ryan McDevitt, Paul Eliason, and Riley League
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy
NBER Working Paper #29491, November 2021
Dying or Lying? For-Profit Hospices and End of Life Care
with Jon Gruber, David Howard and Theo Caputi
Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review
NBER Working Paper #31035, March 2023
Detecting Fraud in Development Aid
with Jean Ensminger
NBER Working Paper #30768, December 2022
Unsupervised Machine Learning for Explainable Health Care Fraud Detection
with Leman Akoglu and Shubhranshu Shekhar
NBER Working Paper #30946, February 2023
Government Audits
with Silvia Vannutelli and Martina Cuneo
NBER Working Paper #30975, February 2023
Works in Progress
“Auctions as Antifraud: Lessons from Durable Medical Equipment”
with Jimmy Roberts, Ryan McDevitt, Paul Eliason, and Riley League
“Unemployment Insurance Fraud during the Covid 19 Pandemic”
with Umang Khetan, Yunrong Zhou and Jialan Wang
“Understanding Medicare Fraud”
with Anup Malani
“Measuring Return on Investment to Healthcare Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Enforcement”
with Cori Andriola and Gabriela Gracia
White Paper, funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Publications:
Economics
Maimonides Rule Redux
with Josh Angrist, Victor Lavy and Adi Shany
American Economic Review: Insights, 2019,
NBER working paper 23486
Online Appendix
Political Economy
Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses
with Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, Dustin Tingley, Christopher Lucas, Shana Gadarian, Bethany Albertson and David Rand
American Journal of Political Science, 2014
Winner, Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, 2014
Machine Learning
Computer-Assisted Reading and Discovery for Student Generated Text in Massive Open Online Courses
with Justin Reich, Dustin Tingley, Molly Roberts, and Brandon Stewart
Journal of Learning Analytics, 2015
Other Writing
Written Testimony for Pennsylvania House of Representatives State Government Committee
October, 2022
“Trillions in infrastructure spending could mean hundreds of billions in fraud,” (2021)
MarketWatch, TheConversation
Quoted in: Wall Street Journal
Contributing Author, Global Anticorruption Blog, Harvard Law School, 2017-2019.
Highlights:
- Rewarding Whistleblowing to Fight Kleptocracy, June 2018
- The Guiding Principle for Anticorruption Policy Should Be Cost-Effectiveness, Not “Zero Tolerance”, September 2018
- Hiding in Plain Sight: How the Federal Elections Commission Can Use Existing Disclosures To Detect Campaign Finance Fraud, October 2018
- Full author profile here