I am working on several ongoing projects related to the distribution of physicians across space and the resulting impact on local health outcomes. "Medical Schools, Physician Maldistribution, and Mortality" aims to understand if building a new public medical school improves the physician-to-population ratio in rural areas in the state that the school is built and how this translates into changes in health outcomes in these areas. "Addressing Racial Disparities in Medical Education and Science" seeks first to understand if the Civil Rights Movement led to increased enrollment of Black students at medical schools, and further, to understand if these students were more likely to choose locate in historically underserved areas. Broadly, I am interested in transformational changes to professional education, the impact these changes have had on the distribution of professionals across space, and the consequences of theses distributional changes on labor market and health outcomes.
Thomas Helgerman is an Assistant Professor in the Work and Organizations Group at the Carlson School of Management in the University of Minnesota. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2023. Thomas is an applied microeconomist with interests in labor economics, economic history, and the economics of gender and family. His current research investigates the impact of public policy on women's educational attainment, earnings, and labor force attachment. Thomas specializes in utilizing casual inference tools in conjunction with detailed institutional knowledge to conduct policy evaluation using archival and survey data.