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Adriana Lleras-Muney, UCLA, “The Impact of Medicare’s Introduction on Life Expectancy”

April 8, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm PDT

 

Biography: Adriana Lleras-Muney is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and was an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University before moving to UCLA. She is an associated editor for the Journal of Health Economics, and she serves on the board editors of the American Economic Review and Demography. She served as a permanent member of the Social Sciences and Population Studies Study Section at the National Institute of Health, and was an elected member of the American Economic Association Executive committee. In 2017 Lleras-Muney won the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Lleras-Muney’s research examines the relationships between socioeconomic status and health, with a particular focus on education, income and policy. Her most recent work investigates the long-term impact of government policies on children by analyzing the effects of programs like the Mother’s Pension program and the Civilian Conservation Corps, implemented during the first half of the 20th century. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, The Review of Economic Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

 

The Impact of Medicare’s Introduction on Life Expectancy

This paper estimates the causal effects of Medicare on mortality rates and life expectancy among the program’s early recipients. We construct a new dataset of more than 18 million individuals observed in the 1940 census linked to a death record in the FamilyTree database at FamilySearch. We use Medicare’s introduction in 1966 to identify its average treatment effects using three pre-specified approaches: a design based on a simple theoretical model of cohort mortality, an interrupted time-series design, and a staggered difference-in-differences design. All three show that Medicare increases life expectancy at age 65 for men born between 1885 and 1915 by an average of one year. Medicare’s effects on life expectancy at age 65 are larger for cohorts with more potential years of exposure but similar for groups of high and low socio-economic status. The effects for women are not robust across methods and specifications.

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