Bates welcomes returning faculty: Nathan Tefft, economics

Assistant Professor of Economics Nathan Tefft goes in for risky behavior — in his work, anyway.

Tefft, who returned to Bates this fall after a couple of years away, is a health economist with distinctive interests.

“A lot of researchers study healthcare systems, financing, things like that,” he says. “I tend to focus more on risky health behaviors as they relate to public policy” — behaviors like tobacco use and excessive food and alcohol consumption.

Here’s a sample of findings published in recent years by Tefft and his research partners, including Bates faculty colleagues and students:

• If you eat more carbohydrates, you’re likely to put on the pounds even if your total calorie consumption and exercise routine remain stable (with Bates economics professor Daniel Crichton-Riera).
• A 1 percent increase in unemployment at the state level is associated with a 1.58 percent decrease in the use of preventive medical care services (with Andrew Kageleiry ’12).
• Men who were mistreated during childhood, especially those who suffered neglect and abuse, are more likely to have obese female partners during young adulthood — and evidence suggests that similarly stressed women are more likely to have male partners who are thin.
• An analysis of federal road accident data suggests that because body mass mitigates alcohol impairment, the presence of obesity in a population reduces the risk of fatal drunk driving accidents.

Tefft is fascinated by questions that explore conflicts between good things — for instance, between personal choice and public health. “Food is an obvious example,” he says. “We need food to survive, but eating too much or the wrong types of food can lead to health problems. So to what extent should we legislate or restrict personal choices?”

A math major at Williams College, Tefft changed course toward economics as he worked toward his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I was interested in social issues,” he explains. “I decided specifically not to pursue mathematics because I wanted to apply those skills to social and policy questions.

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Read more profiles of tenure-track faculty new or returning to Bates in 2014:

• Brett Huggett, assistant professor of biology
• Katharine Ott, assistant professor of mathematics
• Geneviève Robert, assistant professor of geology
• Michael Rocque, assistant professor of sociology

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“Once I started down that path, I started to realize just how many more interesting questions there were.”

For instance, in graduate school he studied the effects of cigarette taxes, a topic well-explored by economists and public-health researchers in other disciplines. The idea behind the taxes is to discourage smoking, a known public health threat, by making cigarettes more expensive and using cigarette tax revenues to combat smoking and its health effects.

“I realized that that model could be applied to soft drink taxes as well, which was being talked about by public health researchers at the time.” (Tefft and collaborators at Madison and the University of Iowa continue to refine research that they first published in 2009 exploring soda taxes and their effectiveness — or lack thereof — in reducing a population’s average body weight.)

“Once I found my way into this area of research, I realized that this is a great place to be,” says Tefft.

The self-described “serious math geek” in Tefft relishes crunching the big data sets that provide the evidence for his conclusions. In fact, in 2015 he’ll teach a new Short Term titled “Big Data.” He says, “it seems to be a trend to call things ‘big data’ or to represent things in those terms, but I think academics and policymakers are still working out what that means and how useful it is.

“So I think it’ll be an exciting course.”

But as a researcher and a teacher, he also can’t get enough of talking policy. “I enjoy getting into the weeds with those discussions  — policy discussions about, ‘How do we get it right?'” he says. “I do it with everybody — not just students but friends, colleagues, whoever.

“So my favorite part of teaching, I guess, is the conversation. I like talking about the math and teaching it, but the discussion is really what I like.”