In New Haven, Yale economists have collaborated with the local public schools on a study demonstrating that a free, full-day pre-school program statewide would help families strengthen their finances and offer a high return on public investment.
On a state level, Yale researchers are working alongside Connecticut administrators to help them improve the state’s Medicaid system and the SNAP food assistance program, which more than a million residents rely on for health care and nutrition, following unprecedented changes in federal policy.
And nationally, Yale research laid the groundwork for a 2020 law to protect people from being slammed by unexpected, and costly, medical bills. And when trade wars and the COVID 19 pandemic began disrupting supply chains, Yale economists provided policymakers and manufacturers tools and impartial data needed to restore the flow of critical products and materials.
These and other projects were led by Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy, a nonpartisan campus hub for facilitating and promoting evidence-based economics research that informs public policy. Since its founding in 2018, the Tobin Center has reduced the gap between research and impact by connecting faculty to policymakers, assuring that their insights could be translated into stronger policies with better outcomes for families, communities, and the country.
In a newly released report, the center documents the real-world impact of its initiatives on Yale research, public policy, and people’s lives.
“Seven years ago, the Tobin Center was created to close the distance between what research shows and what policy does — and to shorten the time it takes to get there,” said Michelle Hahn, acting executive director of the Tobin Center. “In our initial phase, we’ve shown what a university can do in the policy arena, moving economics research beyond papers and into practice. Our next chapter is about supporting more Yale researchers, tackling bigger economic-policy questions, and continuing to build bridges between scholars and policymakers.”
Influencing policies at all levels of government
In its first chapter, the Tobin Center has supported 98 faculty members across seven departments on 120 policy relevant research projects.
One of the center’s initial policy successes emerged from an unprecedented study of 2.2 million emergency room visits across the United States, in which Yale economists Zack Cooper and Fiona Scott Morton found that 22% of patients who went to emergency departments within their health-insurance networks were treated by an out-of-network doctor and potentially incurred major, unexpected expenses.
Instead of allowing this research to sit on a shelf in obscurity, the scholars engaged with policymakers to translate their findings into real-world solutions thanks to the Tobin Center. As they published additional studies exposing the problem of surprise medical bills, Cooper, who directs the center’s Health Care Affordability Lab, regularly traveled to Washington to meet with congressional representatives from both political parties and the White House.
The research informed legislation that passed Congress in December 2020 with bipartisan support that protects patients from surprise medical bills for specific services, including emergency care.
[W]e’ve shown what a university can do in the policy arena, moving economics research beyond papers and into practice.
This is just one of several examples described in the report of the center assisting Yale faculty in sharing their scholarship with the public and the people who shape and enact policy. Through the center’s work, Yale research in recent years has been cited in the State of the Union and gubernatorial addresses, press releases issued by the U.S. Speaker of the House, and in the Economic Report of the President.
The center has also helped faculty members arrange to testify publicly before legislative committees in Congress and in state legislatures. In April, Cooper testified before the Texas House of Representatives Select Committee on Health Care Affordability on the drivers of rising health spending. He did so at the invitation of state Rep. Jim Franks, a Republican from North Texas and chair of the committee.
Zack Cooper testifying before Congress in 2023.
“We define success two ways: when we are generating the best evidence on the country’s hardest economic problems, and when important decisions — major legislation, major budget decisions, and the many rules and regulations that shape people’s lives — have been informed by Yale faculty and their research,” said Steven Berry, Sterling Professor of Economics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Tobin Center’s faculty director. “Doing both is difficult and I’m pleased with our success across multiple issues and multiple levels of government.”
The new report also highlights work done in partnership with researchers at the Yale School of Public Health — led by health economists Chima Ndumele and Jacob Wallace — that helped Connecticut policymakers respond to changes to Medicaid and SNAP programs, both crucial components of the social safety net; research led by economist Judith Chevalier that offered insight into the spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes; and an unprecedented study done in collaboration with Child Care Aware — the country’s largest childcare association — across preschools and childcare centers nationwide that found that children presented no significant threat of disease transmission to early-childhood educators during the pandemic.
I see the Tobin Center as this amazing place of ambition coupled with a real commitment to humanity — with the idea that in pursuing real world questions we can come up with solutions that will make the difference in the lives of so many.
The center also helped connect policymakers with research by economist Amit Khandelwal that revealed how trade wars in 2018 and 2025 affected U.S. consumers and a novel tool developed by economist Aleh Tsyvinski which monitored supply chain disruptions in the wake of the pandemic.
On the environmental front, research by Berry and senior policy fellow Tim Searchinger showed that production of biofuels from crops, long thought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, leads to tropical deforestation and likely increase emissions and food prices in low-income countries where the fuels are produced.
The center supported a comprehensive study by Yale economists John Eric Humphries, Christopher Nielson, and Seth Zimmerman in collaboration with New Haven public schools of a large-scale pre-K program that provides definitive evidence that subsidized early childhood education improves families’ economic outcomes. The research, which was instrumental in the creation of an endowment for early childhood education recently enacted by Connecticut lawmakers, has also been cited in similar efforts underway in other U.S. states, including Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Kentucky.
Just recently, as students across America were heading back to school, the center published a three-part series on the crisis in children’s mental health by Janet Currie, the David Swensen Professor of Economics. Currie also authored an op-ed explaining why new restrictions on youth access to social media sites enacted by the technology giant Meta — and similar measures to prevent social media addiction and reduce time spent on smartphones — are insufficient on their own to solve the mental health crisis.
“I see the Tobin Center as this amazing place of ambition coupled with a real commitment to humanity — with the idea that in pursuing real world questions we can come up with solutions that will make the difference in the lives of so many,” said Yale President Maurie McInnis.
87 Trumbull St., home of the Tobin Center.
Impact in Connecticut and on campus
The Tobin Center has built bridges between Yale and the highest levels of Connecticut’s government, facilitating partnerships between university faculty and state leaders on research concerning Medicaid, early childhood education, and how to boost adoption of electric vehicles through strategic infrastructure enhancements.
The center also worked with the office of Governor Ned Lamont to establish the Connecticut Governor’s Fellowship Program, which brings together promising early-career professionals and senior state officials to address the state’s most pressing policy challenges. To date, the program has channeled 61 fellows — drawn from colleges and universities across the Connecticut — into service for the state.
“I’m proud of what Connecticut and the Tobin Center have built together,” Lamont said. “This partnership puts real talent and the best ideas to work on the challenges that matter most to our state.”
Tobin encouraged me to pursue questions that excited me beyond my day-to-day work, and my faculty advisors gave me the guidance I needed to turn those ideas into real research.
On campus, the center established a Pre-doctoral Research Fellows Program that has helped prepare more than 254 young scholars for doctoral programs or other roles at research institutions.
As a postdoctoral associate in the program, Clara Chambers performed research into the declining marriage rates among women without college degrees that was featured in the online news outlet Axios.
“Tobin encouraged me to pursue questions that excited me beyond my day-to-day work, and my faculty advisors gave me the guidance I needed to turn those ideas into real research,” said Chambers, now a Ph.D. student in economics at Harvard. “Their support, from early drafts through public communication and the publication process, made the project possible.”
The center played an instrumental role in establishing Yale’s Data-Intensive Social Science Center (DISSC), which helps researchers use advanced computing to analyze the large and complex datasets that drive rigorous, evidence-based research. The DISSC helps faculty negotiate the cumbersome process of procuring access to datasets, stay apprised of latest techniques in analyzing data, and safely and securely store datasets.
“DISSC was built with the understanding that social science research is changing quickly, and we want Yale at the forefront of that change,” said DISSC Director Ron Borzekowski.
Over the next five years, the center will build on these successes by empowering faculty to pursue their most ambitious research, deepening partnerships with policymakers across the country, and continuing to convey the evidence and its nuance, in terms decisionmakers can act on, said Hahn, the Tobin Center’s acting executive director.
“We’ve demonstrated what this model can accomplish,” she said. “The question for the next five years is how we build on it and how we support more ambitious work, engage more faculty across Yale, and make Yale research even more consequential in the policy debates shaping people’s lives.”
