Joseph LeCates: About Me

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I am originally from a small town in rural Georgia that has grown tremendously to become a part of the metropolitan Atlanta area. While a student at the University of Georgia I won the Honors Program's Foundation Fellowship and gained educational opportunities across the globe: I learned Spanish while visiting the sites of the 1950s Revolution in Cuba; I hunted and gathered with anthropologist Prof. Deszö Benedek according to the traditions of the Yami people of Irala, Orchid Island, Taiwan; I studied the impact of colonization and tourism on the Galápagos Islands; and I won a grant and built a permanent market structure in rural Conda Abajo, Bolivia, as part of a microfinance internship with the Programa de Desarrollo Agropecuario Integrado (Program for Integrated Agricultural Development) through the Foundation for Sustainable Development. I enthusiastically recommend the UGA Honors Program for undergraduates because it provides a focused academic community, individualized support, and unique opportunities within a large and diverse research university.

After graduating in four years with the combined A.B./M.A. in Economics from the University of Georgia and Terry College of Business, I began my Ph.D. program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Although a student in the Field of Economics, I was supported by and worked in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management with a multidisciplinary faculty focusing on the empirical examination of public policy problems and solutions. I was a Teaching Assistant, Grader, and University Tutor for several courses and have posted my Teaching Evaluations. My dissertation, "Econometric Analyses of Health Care Markets," demonstrated my enthusiasm for finding or, when necessary, developing the right analytical method in order to answer substantively important questions; my research papers "Physician Learning" and "Duration Inaccuracies" have stemmed from that work.

I received my Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University in 2012 and began as an Associate at Analysis Group in Boston, MA, just after. Analysis Group provides economic, financial, and business strategy consulting to law firms, corporations, and government agencies across a wide array of industries. With my background in health economics and econometrics, I have contributed throughout the spectrum of Analysis Group's work, including health economics and outcomes research, litigation support, and strategy analytics. My case work allowed me to pursue my interest in finding and applying statistical solutions to complex problems. For example, our research (Pocoski, LeCates, et al. (2014)) provides a means for using large, health care claims databases to evaluate the health outcomes of patients with hemophilia A. Those databases lack information on whether the patient is receving prophylactic or "on-demand" treatment, preventing researchers from comparing the effectiveness of the two regimens. To overcome this issue and assign a treatment regimen based on a patient's claims, we calibrated a predictive model from a separate data source, specialty pharmacy records, that predicts which regimen the patient is receiving based on observable patient characteristics. By combining multiple data sources, the method allows researchers to analyze health outcomes for patients with a rare disease (approximately 1 in 5,000 males) using a large sample of more than 400 U.S. Medicaid patients. In March 2015 I started a new position as an Economist for the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress to work in public policy. Because my interests lie in the application of economics and statistics, I find fascinating questions in nearly any domain and I enjoy sharing the insights I gain.

In my spare time I have enjoyed restoring and refinishing old furniture. I refinished an oak table with seating for twelve that had been heavily-used in a community center and I salvaged a broken, Stickley-style desk with wormy chestnut top to create a living room table. My favorite project has been a mid-century Kent Coffee "tableau" dresser for which I reapplied portions of veneer and had the original drawer pulls reproduced.