Scholars@Duke
Jonathan Zhang

Jonathan Zhang

Assistant Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy
Sanford School of Public Policy
jonathan.zhang@duke.edu
302 Towerview Rd., Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Socioeconomic status and access to mental health care: The case of psychiatric medications for children in Ontario Canada.

Journal Article Journal of health economics · January 2024 We examine differences in the prescribing of psychiatric medications to lower-income and higher-income children in the Canadian province of Ontario using rich administrative data that includes diagnosis codes and physician identifiers. Our most striking fi ... Full text Cite

Primary care providers’ influence on opioid use and its adverse consequences

Journal Article Journal of Public Economics · January 1, 2023 Primary care is the most frequently utilized health service and is the source of nearly half of all opioids prescribed in the United States. This paper studies the impact of exposure to high prescribing primary care providers (PCP) on opioid use, opioid us ... Full text Cite

Mental health treatment and the role of tele-mental health at the veterans health administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Journal Article Psychological services · May 2022 To quantify overall trends in patients treated for mental health disorders and adverse events, including via tele-mental health (TMH) and psychopharmacology during pandemic-related health care transformation. Longitudinal observational study including vete ... Full text Cite

Pathways into Opioid Dependence: Evidence from Practice Variation in Emergency Departments

Journal Article American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · January 1, 2022 We use practice variation across physicians to uncover the role of medical care in causing opioid dependence. Using health records of 2 million US veterans with emergency department visits, we find that quasi-random assignment to a top (versus bottom) deci ... Full text Cite

Hospital avoidance and unintended deaths during the covid-19 pandemic

Journal Article American Journal of Health Economics · September 1, 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered individual behaviors, including the consumption of health care. I study utilization and mortality in the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, the Veterans Health Administration, and find tha ... Full text Cite

Consolidation of primary care physicians and its impact on healthcare utilization.

Journal Article Health economics · June 2021 We use administrative data from Medicare to document the massive consolidation of primary care physicians over the last decade and its impact on patient healthcare utilization. We first document that primary care organizations have consolidated all over th ... Full text Cite

Prescribing of Opioid Analgesics and Buprenorphine for Opioid Use Disorder During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Journal Article JAMA network open · April 2021 ImportanceThe COVID-19 pandemic disrupted medical care, impacting prescribing of opioid analgesics and buprenorphine for opioid use disorder. Understanding these patterns can help address barriers to care.ObjectiveTo evaluate how prescrib ... Full text Cite

What to expect when you are expecting: Are health care consumers forward-looking?

Journal Article Journal of health economics · September 2019 A fundamental question in health insurance markets is how do health care consumers dynamically optimize their medical utilization under non-linear insurance contracts? Our paper tests the neoclassical prediction that a fully forward-looking agent only resp ... Full text Cite

Genetic variation, simplicity, and evolutionary constraints for function-valued traits.

Journal Article The American naturalist · June 2015 Understanding the patterns of genetic variation and constraint for continuous reaction norms, growth trajectories, and other function-valued traits is challenging. We describe and illustrate a recent analytical method, simple basis analysis (SBA), that use ... Full text Cite