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

Scholarly Works

Clinician behavior when skin tone affects test results.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2026 We compare care for Black vs. White patients following pulse oximetry, a widely used device for measuring blood oxygen levels which overestimates oxygen saturation in darker-skinned patients. Black patients are therefore medically more appropriate for foll ... Full text Cite

Association between prenatal opioid exposure and health, education, and foster care between ages 0 and 18.

Journal article PNAS nexus · March 2026 The opioid crisis has emerged as a critical public health challenge, yet the long-term outcomes of children exposed before birth remain underexamined. Prior studies have focused on acute neonatal outcomes or adult opioid misuse, leaving the broader develop ... Full text Cite

Invisible Wounds: How Mental Disability Benefits Shape Veteran Well-Being

Journal article American Economic Journal: Economic Policy · February 1, 2026 We study impacts of VA disability compensation on the health and well-being of the large and rapidly growing population of veterans claiming mental disorders. We leverage quasi-random assignment of veterans to medical examiners with varying assessi ... Full text Cite

High-risk emergency department visits and risk of all-cause mortality, suicide, and fatal overdose among US military veterans.

Journal article American journal of epidemiology · January 2026 Deaths due to overdose and suicide together comprise an urgent public health challenge. Using Veterans Health Administration (VHA) electronic health records, we identified patients with high-risk emergency department (ED) visits related to suicidality or o ... Full text Cite

Is the Veterans Affairs Suicide Prevention in Emergency Department Intervention associated with improved mental health attendance and all-cause mortality outcomes?

Journal article Psychological services · September 2025 In late 2018, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) implemented the Suicide Prevention in Emergency Department (SPED; 116th U.S. Congress, 2020; VA, 2018) initiative to protect veteran lives and promote follow-up with mental health services. SPED ma ... Full text Cite

LIVES VERSUS LIVELIHOODS: THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT RECESSION ON MORTALITY AND WELFARE.

Journal article The quarterly journal of economics · August 2025 We leverage spatial variation in the severity of the Great Recession across the United States to examine its impact on mortality and explore the quantitative implications. We estimate that an increase in the unemployment rate of the magnitude of the Great ... Full text Cite

Doing More with Less: Predicting Primary Care Provider Effectiveness.

Journal article The review of economics and statistics · March 2025 We use data from the Veterans Administration to examine the efficacy of primary care providers (PCPs). Leveraging quasi-random assignment of veterans to PCPs, we measure effectiveness using ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC) and hospitalizations/e ... Full text Cite

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 Open Access 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 Open Access 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 Open Access 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 Open Access 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 Open Access 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 Open Access 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 Open Access 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