Biography
Dahlia Remler Professor Marxe School of Public and International Affairs Baruch College, City University of New York
Dahlia Remler is Professor at the Marxe School of Public & International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York. She is also a professor in the Department of Economics, The CUNY Graduate Center, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliate of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research.
Dahlia Remler has published in many areas of health economics, including health savings accounts, cost-sharing, managed care, health insurance and health care markets, and cigarette tax regressivity. Other research has focused on practical strategies for causal research.
Dahlia co-developed with Sanders Korenman, the first poverty measure that treats health insurance as a basic need and health insurance benefits as resources to meet that need—the health-inclusive poverty measure (HIPM). They and Rosemary Hyson have published seven peer-reviewed articles and three reports on or using the HIPM. The HIPM approach was recommended by a National Academies panel and has been implemented by the US Census Bureau as a research series.
Textbook and Teaching
Dahlia is co-author (with Gregg Van Ryzin) of Research Methods in Practice: Strategies for Description and Causation, now in its third edition. The book emphasizes the critical interpretation and practical application of research findings throughout, focusing on causation and real-life data. Teaching causation is a passion.
For over twenty five years, Dahlia has taught professional master’s students how to interpret evidence of causal effects and practical approaches to estimating the causal impacts. She believes more people can and need to learn these important skills. To pursue that mission, she is now launching the website CausalLiteracy.com.
Education and Past Positions
After a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, Dahlia received a Marshall Scholarship and earned a doctorate in Physical Chemistry from Oxford University. She then went to graduate school all over again and received her PhD in Economics from Harvard. During her last year as a PhD student, she was a Dissertation Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She then did an Agency of Health Care Policy Research post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She was then an assistant professor at Tulane University’s and Columbia University’s schools of public health.
More About Me
Dahlia lives with her husband, Howard, in New York City, where they enjoy the city’s theaters, restaurants, and parks—and Dahlia enjoys being a complete amateur in some of the city’s superb dance studios.
Who Am I? The Existential Version
I am a professor at the Marxe School of Public & International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York.
I am a health economist. My topics have been diverse, including health savings accounts, cigarette tax regressivity, cost-sharing, drivers of health care cost growth, ways to measure health insurance take-up, information technology in health care, and more.
I am a poverty scholar—a niche one. Sanders Korenman and I developed the Health-Inclusive Poverty Measure, incorporating health insurance needs and benefits. A National Academies panel recommended our approach and the Census Bureau implemented it as a research series. With Rosemary Hyson, we have written ten articles and reports over twelve years—the longest I have worked on one topic.
I am an odd economist. I have written much theory in words aimed at policymakers and other non-economists. My work has often included simple illustrative calculations, descriptive analysis, and computer simulations to provide insights into methods. I have done little empirical causal research, the bread-and-butter of most applied economists. I am proud of my oddness.
I am a teacher. I have taught master’s in public administration and other professional master’s students for over twenty-five years. My passion is teaching causal reasoning and methods as accessibly and relevantly as possible. I want my practitioner students to be able to figure out what works—and how well—in their everyday careers. I want them to spot bad conclusions and make the best possible use of available evidence and their own reasoning. That passion makes me a tough teacher.
I am a textbook writer. Gregg Van Ryzin and I wrote Research Methods in Practice: Strategies for Description and Causation, now in its third edition. It is my proudest accomplishment.
I am an educational oddity—a high school dropout with two doctorates. My degrees range from electrical engineering to theoretical chemistry to economics.
I am a wife, friend, and devoted, but very amateur, modern dancer. I live a life much less odd and far less fraught than in my youth.
I hope to become a public intellectual—one both niche and odd. With this site, I am resurrecting my blog but focusing it on higher education in this tumultuous time. In my new site, CausalLiteracy.com, I make the case that education at all levels could and should include causal methods.