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K-State Today

May 2, 2017

Annual Economics Club Debate is today

Submitted by Dan Kuester

Martin Gaynor from Carnegie Mellon University and Casey Mulligan from the University of Chicago will present the annual Economics Club Debate at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 2, in 105 Umberger Hall.

Tickets are required to attend. Pick up free tickets in 327 Waters Hall. This event has been underwritten by the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation.

The title of the debate is "A Discussion on the Affordable Care Act and Other Health Care Legislation."

Gaynor is the E.J. Barone professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and former director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. He is one of the founders of the Health Care Cost Institute, an independent nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing knowledge about U.S. health care spending, and served as the first chair of its governing board. He also is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an international research fellow at the University of Bristol, and a board member of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. Before joining Carnegie, Gaynor held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins University and a number of other universities. He has been an invited visitor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Northwestern University, and the Toulouse School of Economics.

His research focuses on competition and antitrust policy in health care markets. He has written extensively on this topic, testified before Congress, worked with the state of Pennsylvania on its health innovation initiative, and advised the governments of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and South Africa on competition issues in health care. He has won a number of awards for his research, including the American Economic Journal's Economic Policy Best Paper Award; the Victor R. Fuchs Research Award; the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation's Health Care Research Award; the Kenneth J. Arrow Award; a finalist for the Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship; and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. Gaynor received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 and his doctorate from Northwestern University in 1983.

Mulligan, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, received his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1993 and also has served as a visiting professor teaching public economics at Harvard University, Clemson University, and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, and the Population Research Center. He has received awards and fellowships from the Manhattan Institute, National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Smith-Richardson Foundation, and John M. Olin Foundation. His research covers capital and labor taxation, the gender wage gap, health economics, Social Security, voting and the economics of aging.

Mulligan has written widely on discrepancies between economic analysis and conventional wisdom. Before "Side Effects and Complications," he wrote "The Redistribution Recession" and "Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality." He also has written numerous op-eds and blog entries for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, blogsupplyanddemand.com, and other blogs and periodicals.