Kathleen Mullen
Associate Economist
RAND

Kathleen Mullen (Ph.D., Economics, University of Chicago) is an Associate Economist at RAND and Professor of Economics at the RAND Graduate School, where she teaches Advanced Econometrics. Her research interests include applied microeconomics, economics of aging, and health economics, and she is particularly interested in the topic of disability insurance. She is currently working on an MRRC-funded project with Maestas and Strand analyzing the consistency of the disability determination process and its implications for the labor supply of beneficiaries. She is also involved in an SSA task order project led by Maestas proposing potential research designs to estimate potential induced entry into SSDI resulting from a proposed benefit offset policy. In other work, Mullen is PI on an NIH-funded project combining policy variation from Austrian Social Security reforms and administrative social security records data to identify wealth and incentive effects of Social Security benefits and estimate a dynamic structural model of retirement. In past work she has estimated the effect of schooling on achievement test scores controlling for endogenous schooling, which earned her and her coauthors the 2005 Dennis J. Aigner Award for the best applied econometrics paper published in the Journal of Econometrics in the previous two years. She also has studied the incentive effects of pay-for-performance for physicians.