Atheendar Venkataramani
@atheendar.bsky.social
Physician and health economist at Penn. I study opportunity, hope, and health @oppforhealthlab.bsky.social. Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/atheendar/
1/ **New Op-ed** My patients often tell me they feel #stuck and that it makes them sick. In the last few years we @oppforhealthlab.bsky.social have defined and measured #stuckness and its impact on #health. We have come to see stuckness as a unifying explanation for our country's health crisis.
Why do so many Americans feel “stuck”—and what does that mean for public health? In the @inquirer.com, LDI's @atheendar.bsky.social argues that understanding economic insecurity, disability, isolation, and limited mobility is key to improving health nationwide. https://bit.ly/4xgdef1
Americans feel stuck — and it’s making us sick | Opinion
We’ve reached our 250th anniversary as a stuck country. It’s more than just poverty, loneliness, or a lack of opportunity — and it is one of the biggest threats to our public health.
inquirer.com
Terrific @inquirer.com op-ed on "stuckness" by @pennmehp.bsky.social's @atheendar.bsky.social. www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...
Americans feel stuck — and it’s making us sick | Opinion
We’ve reached our 250th anniversary as a stuck country. It’s more than just poverty, loneliness, or a lack of opportunity — and it is one of the biggest threats to our public health.
inquirer.com
Prediction: This paper will generate a lot of discussion. www.nber.org/papers/w35544
Two Selection Problems, One Bias Term: Experimental Sign-Up Is Treatment Choice in Disguise
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
nber.org
In the @inquirer.com, which I think is among the best newspapers in U.S., Dr. Atheendar S. Venkataramani writes: “We are overlooking the most critical element of public health for Americans: feeling stuck. …It’s more than just poverty, loneliness, or a lack of opportunity.” share.inquirer.com/ldmDUz
Americans feel stuck — and it’s making us sick | Opinion
We’ve reached our 250th anniversary as a stuck country. It’s more than just poverty, loneliness, or a lack of opportunity — and it is one of the biggest threats to our public health.
share.inquirer.com
"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/
🧵To seniors: - move away from bean-counting (easy, right?). E.g., when evaluating CVs or grants or applicants, ask for the top 3 pubs, with a paragraph explaining why these are important. Hiring on a CV of 50 pubs was always sort of meaningless, now it's become meaningless-er (!) and gameable. 2/
Question: is it common to conduct statistical inference on identified sets in partial identification? I know of the Imbens-Manski approach, but how often is this (or other methods to obtain confidence sets) apply?
The entire "Good Science" series from @pennldi.bsky.social is amazing! Great sci-comm in an era where we need to build trust. (PS. I'm not biased because of who the host is.)
Population Aging Research Center@pennaging.bsky.social · 5d agoResearch Associate Atul Gupta is featured in the @pennldi.bsky.social series “Good Science,” which delves into the future of health care & health policy by discussing the questions that inspire research, evidence generated, & real-world impact. https://youtu.be/FBU1UeSlyQw?si=x6VQ3jHdz8lod7rj
Really excited to announce that Michael Harhay, Scott Halpern, and I are hiring a post-doc. apply.interfolio.com/190196 If you do methodologically rigorous empirical work in the economics of hospital-based healthcare, please apply. A dream team with access to amazing data and expertise.
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
“Two teams can find nearly the same fact. The paper with the higher general-interest ceiling may not have a dramatically more credible estimate. It may instead ask the estimate to do more.”
Jason Fletcher@jasonmfletcher.bsky.social · last wk.How to Write a Top 5 Paper: A Case Study open.substack.com/pub/jasonmfl...
I wanted to share some notes from spending the day not at NBER: 1) I was a comfortable temperature. 2) I had decent chicken for lunch. 3) I made a casual remark about something and didn’t receive a response using the phrase “diminishing marginal utility” or “reverse causation”
"The recent U.S. mortality crisis reveals a weakening—and growing inequality—in the conversion of aggregate resources into longevity gains." www.nber.org/papers/w35470
Leveraging mandatory combat deployments of physicians in the US military to obtain novel causal estimates of skill depreciation and learning-by-doing, from Trevor Fitzgerald, Atul Gupta, and Stephen D. Schwab www.nber.org/papers/w35502
Everything you've ever wanted to know about AI and research github.com/paulgp/nber_... Video will be posted I believe.
github.com
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham@paulgp.com · 2w agoI will be presenting in the NBER Household Finance Summer Institute session this Friday at 1pm on "Using AI in Household Finance Research: A Practical Guide." www.nber.org/conferences/...
1/When #attrition looks like this in an endline survey in an RCT: Baseline disadvantage reduces endline participation, but only in control (here higher values of Kessler 6 = worse) Why? It seems like successful interventions can change who remains observable!
"Crime - boy I don't know." Except we kind of *do* know some things. Coming Fall/Winter 2026.
1/ I read it. Fascinating. On a surface level there are many things to like, incl faster review times and trying to fund investigators taking new directions. There are also some things that are troublesome, like moving away from life sciences and anti-immigrant bent.
Atheendar Venkataramani@atheendar.bsky.social · 2w agoThis is what I will be reading/focusing on: www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...
When I ran BLS, I was asked constantly about the impact of AI on jobs. It's still one of the most common questions I get. So we put together a policy brief - for policymakers, journalists, and anyone trying to sort through what is happening with AI and jobs: siepr.stanford.edu/publications...
What is really happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
Other
siepr.stanford.edu
New, great knowledge translation covering our paper on geriatric abdominal pain--it's approachable, hits the clinical problem right on the head & talks about the actual numbers in accurate ways without using jargon: www.instagram.com/reel/DbCDpEJ...
Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.
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This is what I will be reading/focusing on: www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...
Atheendar Venkataramani@atheendar.bsky.social · 2w ago1/ There is too little introspection in discussions about the #OMB, #NIH, and federal funding for research. Our #industry (academia) is NOT a healthy one. You can't win existential fights if you don't come in strong. In the last few years, I've seen:
When older children carry common respiratory viruses back home to their infant siblings, it can have long-term detrimental effects on adulthood income, say researchers at @ucph.bsky.social, Fudan University, @stanforduniversity.bsky.social, and Northwestern. #econsky www.aeaweb.org/research/cha...
The long shadow of infant illness
Danish data reveal how viruses brought home by older siblings influence lifetime income.
aeaweb.org
"Four months into an appeal, Ms. McDonald, a cancer survivor who weighs 69 pounds, bustles to food banks, stretches ground turkey with oatmeal, and skips meals to feed three teenage boys." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/u...
Faced With Piles of New Paperwork, People Are Losing Food Stamps
Arizona’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program rolls have plummeted, offering a possible preview of national trends as states try to avoid new federal penalties.
nytimes.com
State- and county-level Preston curves show that economic growth in the 2010s no longer translated into broad gains in life expectancy, from Ritikaa Khanna, Rourke O'Brien, Andrew C. Stokes, @atheendar.bsky.social, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field www.nber.org/papers/w35470
