Ralph Bradley
About
Background
My 43 year career has taken me down both the path of a data user and data producer. I began my career in Lousiana State government first in the Planning Office and then later as the State Economist in the Governor's Office. My main duty was to build an econometric model that predicted stat revenues for budgeting purposes. Here I had to rely on many data sources from the Federal and state government and from the private sector. Inaccurate revenue forecasts were embarrassing, and as a result, I had to quickly learn both the strengths and weaknesses of the data produced by our fragmented statistical system.
In 1985, I left Louisiana when I took a position at Chase Econometrics as a regional economist. Here, I and my colleagues maintained and ran a large econometric regional forecasting model that predicted a wide variety of variables for each state such as housing starts, personal income, employment by industrial sector and migration. Later, Chase Econometrics was bought out by Wharton Econometrics. It was here that I learned in a non-academic setting how wrong highly theoretical models could go.
It was my experience at Chase that led me to pursue a PhD in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. My fields were econometrics and healthcare. During that time I earned the Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA) Charter Holder.
Upon graduation, I left Philadelphia to start a job at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) where I worked for twenty six years. I was in the Division of Price and Index Number Research where we evaluated the various inflation measures produced by BLS. My work helped lead to the implementation of a new inflation measure – the Chained Consumer Price Index, and I developed a new way to measure healthcare inflation with disease based price indexes. I have published in a wide variety of journals. In 2006, I won the Editor’s Choice Award for Economic Inquiry. In 2014, I became the Division Chief.
Presently, I am retired in New Hampshire. I do a variety of contract work such as writing questions for practice CFA exams, evaluating research methods at various think tanks and consulting on the federal statistical system. I have had a brief exposure to nonprofits by serving as a treasurer for a small church. I am still active with the financial world. I have started to work with machine learning only to find that many of the prediction methods are the same as the econometric methods developed in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
I have developed this website as a research resource. Please say hello on the Contact page.
Publications in Refereed Jornals and Books
• “The Measuring Prices and Real Household Consumption of Medical Goods: Service based versus disease based approaches” 2019 in Handbook of US Consumer Economics, Academic Press, 355-388 (with Brett Matsumoto).
• “How Government Statistics Adjust for Potential Biases from Quality Change and New Goods in an Age of Digital Technologies: A View from the Trenches,” (2017) Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31 (2): 187-210 (with Groshen, Erica L., Brian C. Moyer, Ana M. Aizcorbe, and David M. Friedman).
•“Feasible methods to estimate disease based price indexes”, 2013, Journal of Health Economics, Vol.32, No 3,504-514.
• “A Comparison of Two Concepts for Consumer Medical Price Indexes", 2010, Monthly Labor Review, 20-28. (with Elaine Cardenas, Daniel Ginsberg, Lyubov Rozental, and Frankie Velez)
• “Defining Health Insurance Affordability: Unobserved Heterogeneity Matters”, 2009, Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 28, No. 1, 255-264.
• “Analytical Bias Reduction for Small Samples in the US Consumer Price Index,” 2007, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Vol. 25, No. 3, 337-346
• “A Semi-Parametric Model for Asymmetric Information in Health Plan Markets”, 2005, Economic Inquiry, 2005, 43(4):812-822 .
• “A Robust Estimation of the Effects of Taxation on Charitable Contributions,” 2005, Contemporary Economic Policy 23(4):545-554 (With McClelland, R and Holden, S.).
• “Pitfalls of using Unit Values as a Price Measure or Price Index,” 2005, , Journal of Social and Economic Measurement. Vol. 30, No. 1, 39-61.
• “Finite Sample Effects in the Estimation of Substitution Bias in the Consumer Price Index,” 2002, Journal of Official Statstics, 17(3), 369-390.
• “A Kernel Test for Neglected Nonlinearity,” 1996, Journal of Nonlinear Dynamics, 1(2), 119-130, (with McClelland R.).
• “Growth of US Health Care Spending,” 1994, Contemporary Economic Policy, 12(4), 45-56.
National Bureau of Economic Research Publications (NBER)
• “The Simultaneous Effects of Obesity, Insurance Choice, and Medical Visit Choice on Health Care Costs,” 2018 in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs, University of Chicago Press, 211-242 (with Colin Baker).
• “Can A Disease-Based Price Index Improve the Estimation of the Medical CPI?” 2009, in Price Index Concepts and Measurement, eds. Diewert W.E, Greenlees J.S., and Hulten C.R., University of Chicago Press .329-372
• “Price Index Estimation Using Price Imputation for Unsold Items,” 2003, in Scanner Data and Price Indexes, eds. Feenstra R. and Shapiro M., University of Chicago Press, 349-380.
• “An Overview of Research in the Potential Uses of Scanner Data” 1998, Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the International Working Group on Price Indexes, 169-182.
© Copyright Ralph Bradley, 2022