Jeanne Ringel
Ph.D. Director, Public Health Systems and Preparedness Initiative, RAND Health; Senior Economist, RAND Corporation
Jeanne Ringel, Ph.D. is a RAND economist specializing in health economics, labor economics, and public finance. Her policy areas include economics of tobacco control, substance abuse, the effects of public policies on maternal and child health including mental health, and welfare reform. Currently, Dr. Ringel is a Co-Principal Investigator on a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the role of state-level policy and market characteristics in explaining geographic variation in mental health need and service use among children. In related work funded by NIMH, Dr. Ringel and a colleague estimated total expenditures on mental health for children in the US . This study was the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of national expenditures on mental health services for children since the dramatic growth of managed care in the 1990s. In a recent study she estimated the burden of out-of-pocket mental health expenditures among adults using data from the HealthCare for Communities Project.
Dr. Ringel is also currently an investigator on a study funded by NIDA to estimate the social costs of marijuana-use. In particular, she is leading an analysis of the effect of youth marijuana use on educational outcomes. Her other studies of substance abuse include the effect of cigarette smoking during pregnancy on birth outcomes, the relationship between adolescent marijuana use and subsequent labor market outcomes, and the effect of clean indoor air laws and youth access restrictions on adolescent demand for cigarettes. She is also Co-PI on a grant that was recently funded to look at the effect of the number and density of alcohol outlets on problem drinking. In addition, Dr. Ringel has worked on a series of Congressionally mandated projects funded by the Veterans’ Administration to develop a methodology that could be used to allocate the VA’s health care budget across its regional networks. Much of her work involves program evaluation.
At IPPAM, Dr. Ringel teaches the course on policy and program evaluation.
