Eric is the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour Economics at University of Cambridge, Professor of Economics at University College London, Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) and a Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His primary research interests are labor, public finance, health, and applied econometrics. French's research has been published in Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Handbook of Labor Economics, Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, Annual Reviews, American Economic Journal: Policy, and Journal of Human Resources. Previously he was a senior economist and research advisor on the microeconomics team in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He also taught at the Department of Economics and the Business School at Northwestern University.
Education
PhD Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999
MSc Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997
BA (High Honours with Distinction) Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 1992
Estimates of how health affects employment vary considerably. We assess how different methods and health measures impact estimates of the impact of health on employment using a unified framework for the US and England.
In this review, we document end-of-life medical spending: its level, composition, funding, and contribution to aggregate medical spending. We discuss how end-of-life expenses affect household behavior and economic evidence on the efficacy of medical spending at the end of life. Finally, we document recent trends in health and chronic disease at older ages and discuss what they might imply for end-of-life spending and medical spending in the aggregate.
Medicaid is a government programme that also provides health insurance to the elderly who have few assets and either low income or catastrophic health care expenses. We ask how the Medicaid rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency, and we ask what other observable characteristics are important to determine who ends up on Medicaid.
We use the best available longitudinal data set, the Health and Retirement Study, and a battery of causal inference methods to provide both central estimates and bounds for the long-term effect of health insurance on health and mortality among the near-elderly (initial age 50–61) over a 20-year period.