Dr. Jared Black

Bio

Dr. Jared L. Black is an Assistant Professor in the U.S. Army-Baylor University Graduate Program in Health and Business Administration, where he teaches graduate courses in economics, statistics, and AI applications for healthcare. His research applies econometrics and causal inference methods to health systems, with a focus on how public policy and institutional change shape clinical and financial outcomes. 

Dissertation

Essays on Hospital-Level Economic Outcomes: Evidence from Psychedelic Decriminalization and Health System Data Breaches

Abstract

Hospitals absorb shocks they did not choose: policy changes that alter patient demand,
cyberattacks that disrupt operations, and clinical trends that strain capacity. This dissertation
examines the hospital-level effects of such disruptions through three independent essays,
each exploiting the staggered timing of external shocks to isolate their causal effects
on hospitals. The first two trace the downstream consequences of city-level psychedelic
decriminalization on psychiatric emergency and inpatient care. The third investigates the
financial footprint of cybersecurity breaches.

What Faculty Say

What sets this dissertation apart is that Jared did not merely answer existing questions with better data. He identified questions that the field had failed to ask. No prior study had estimated the causal effect of psychedelic decriminalization on any health outcome. The entire research design had to be invented. Jared built the data infrastructure from approximately 60 million emergency department records and the complete California inpatient discharge files, constructed the analytic framework, and produced the first credible estimates in a literature that had none. The second essay combines a quasi-experimental policy evaluation with individual-level survival analysis, a pairing that is, to my knowledge, novel in this literature. And the data breach essay’s central insight, that static cost models dramatically overstate long-run breach damages because they cannot capture mean reversion, reframes how we should think about the entire policy debate around breach costs.

- Dr. Scott Cunningham Ben H. Williams Professor of Economics, Baylor University