Jeffrey E. Harris, is an economist and physician who has been on the faculty of the Economics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1977. He received an AB (summa cum laude, 1969) from Harvard University,Harris' undergraduate thesis advisor was Kenneth J. Arrow (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1972). as well as an MD (1974) and a PhD in economics (1975) from the University of Pennsylvania. Having trained in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital (1974–1977), he maintained a medical practice at that institution until 2006. Since then, he has continued to practice as an internist at federally sponsored community health centers in Rhode Island, where the majority of his patients have poverty-level incomes and are not fluent in English.
Research Harris has published widely on smoking and health,Harris JE. Cigarette Smoking in the United States, 1950-1978, in Smoking and Health, A Report of the Surgeon General (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1979): A1-A29.Harris JE. "Trends in Smoking-Attributable Mortality," Chapter 3 in: Reducing the Health Consequences of Smoking, 25 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989): 117-169.Harris JE. Cigarette Smoking Among Successive Birth Cohorts of Men and Women in the United States During 1900-80. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 1983; 71: 473-79.Harris JE. Cigarette Smoke Components and Disease: Cigarette Smoke is Far More Than a Triad of 'Tar,' Nicotine, and Carbon Monoxide. NCI Smoking and Tobacco Control Monographs 1996; 7 (Chapt. 5): 59-75.Harris JE. Smoke Yields of Tobacco-Specific Nitrosamines in Relation to FTC Tar Level and Cigarette Manufacturer: Analysis of the Massachusetts Benchmark Study. Public Health Reports 2001 (July-Aug); 116: 336-343.Harris JE, Thun MJ, Mondul AM, Calle EE. Cigarette Tar Yields in Relation to Mortality from Lung Cancer in the Cancer Prevention Study II Prospective Cohort, 1982-8. British Medical Journal 2004 (10 Jan); 328: 72-76.Harris JE. Incomplete Compensation Does Not Imply Reduced Harm: Yields of 40 Smoke Toxicants per Milligram Nicotine in Regular Filter versus Low Tar Cigarettes in the 1999 Massachusetts Benchmark Study. Nicotine & Tobacco Research 2004 (October); 6: 797-807. the economics of smoking and public policy toward the tobacco industry,Harris JE, Public Policy Issues in the Promotion of Less Hazardous Cigarettes, in Gio Gori and Fred Bock, eds., A Safe Cigarette? Banbury Report 3. Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1980: 333-40.Harris JE. Taxing Tar and Nicotine, American Economic Review 1980; 70: 300-11.Harris JE. Increasing the Federal Excise Tax on Cigarettes. Journal of Health Economics 1982; 1: 117-20.Harris JE. The 1983 Increase in the Federal Excise Tax on Cigarettes. Tax Policy and the Economy 1987; 1: 87-111.Harris JE, Connolly GN, Brooks D, et al. Cigarette Smoking Before and After an Excise-Tax Increase and Anti-Smoking Campaign - Massachusetts, 1990-1996. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1996; 45: 966-70.Harris JE. American Cigarette Manufacturers' Ability to Pay Damages: Overview and a Rough Calculation. Tobacco Control 1996; 5: 292-294.Harris JE, Chan SW. The Continuum of Addiction: Cigarette Smoking in Relation to Price Among Americans Aged 15-29. Health Economics Letters 1998; 2:3-12. Reprinted in Health Economics, 1999; 8: 81-86.Biener L, Harris JE, Hamilton W. Impact of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Programme: Population Based Trend Analysis. British Medical Journal 2000 (5 Aug); 321: 351-354.Harris JE, López-Valcárcel BG. Asymmetric peer effects in the analysis of cigarette smoking among young people in the United States, 1992-1999. Journal of Health Economics, 2008; 27: 249-264. HIV/AIDS,Harris JE. Improved Short-Term Survival of AIDS Patients Initially Diagnosed with Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia, 1984 through 1987. Journal of the American Medical Association 1990; 263: 397-402.Harris JE. Reporting Delays and the Incidence of AIDS. Journal of the American Statistical Association 1990; 85: 915-24.Harris JE. Why We Don't Have an AIDS Vaccine, and How We Can Develop One. Health Affairs 2009; 28(6):1642-54.Bautista-Arredondo S, Gadsden P, Harris JE, Bertozzi SM, Optimizing Resource Allocation for HIV/AIDS Prevention Programs: An Analytical Framework. AIDS 2008; 22(suppl 2):S1-S8. health economics,Harris JE. The Internal Organization of Hospitals: Some Economic Implications. Bell Journal of Economics 1977; 8: 467-82.Harris JE, Regulation and Internal Control in Hospitals, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 1979; 55: 88-103.Harris JE. Pricing Rules for Hospitals. Bell Journal of Economics 1979; 10: 224-43.Harris JE, Prenatal Medical Care and Infant Mortality, in Victor Fuchs ed., Economic Aspects of Health. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982: 15-52.Harris JE, Macro-Experiments Versus Micro-Experiments for Health Policy, in: Jerry Hausman and David Wise, eds., Social Experimentation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985: 145-85.Harris JE, How Many Doctors are Enough? Health Affairs 1986; 5: 73-83.Sosa-Rubí S, Galárraga O, Harris JE. Heterogeneous Impact of the "Seguro Popular" Program on the Utilization of Obstetrical Services in Mexico, 2001-2006: A Multinomial Probit Model with a Discrete Endogenous Variable. Journal of Health Economics 2009; 28: 20-34. as well as economicsWilliamson O, Wachter M, Harris JE, Understanding the Employment Relation: The Analysis of Idiosyncratic Exchange. Bell Journal of Economics 1975; 6: 250-78. and statisticsDuMouchel WH, Harris JE. Bayes Methods for Combining the Results of Cancer Studies in Humans and Other Species Journal of the American Statistical Association 1983; 78: 293-308, Rejoinder 313-15. generally. He is author of Deadly Choices: Coping with Health Risks in Everyday Life.Harris JE, Deadly Choices: Coping with Health Risks in Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 1993: 269pp. .
Research publications
Williamson-Wachter-Harris (1975) As a graduate student, Harris collaborated with his doctoral thesis adviser, Oliver E. Williamson (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2008), in an article entitled Understanding the Employment Relation: The Analysis of Idiosyncratic Exchange.Williamson O, Wachter M, Harris JE, Understanding the Employment Relation: The Analysis of Idiosyncratic Exchange. Bell Journal of Economics 1975; 6: 250-78. This article (294 Web of Science (WoS) citations, 928 Google Scholar (GS) citations) was subsequently reproduced in several collections,Putterham L, ed., The Economic Nature of the Firm: A Reader. Cambridge University Press, 1986. including Williamson's Markets and Hierarchies (1975).Williamson OE. Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications, A Study in the Economics of Internal Organization. Free Press, 1975. The article has been described as "the first explicit application of the new institutional economics to internal labor markets."Kaufman BE, ed., Government Regulation of the Employment Relationship. Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 80.
The Internal Organization of Hospitals (1977) Based upon Harris' training in the economics of organization and his experiences as a medical resident, this article (149 WoS citations, 411 GS citations) has been listed as one of the top articles in the last four decades of scholarship in health economics.Wagstaff A, Culyer AJ, Four decades of health economics through a bibliometric lens. Journal of Health Economics 2012; 31:406-39. Reproduced in several collections,Luke RD, Bauer JC, eds., Issues in Health Economics, Aspen Systems Press, 1982.Kovner AR, Neuhauser D, eds., Health Services Management: Readings and Commentary, 3rd edition. Health Administration Press, 1987. the article was cited in the first generation of health economics textbooks as the Harris Model: "The hospital, under Harris' account, is the scene of continual conflict within an organization inherently split into two parts, what Harris describes as a noncooperative oligopoly game."Folland S, Goodman AC, Stano M, The Economics of Health and Health Care, 1st edition. Macmillan, 1993. See "The Harris Model," pp. 369-70.
DuMouchel-Harris (1983) Based upon his participation in the Diesel Impacts Study Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, Harris collaborated with William H. DuMouchel in an article entitled Bayes Methods for Combining the Results of Cancer Studies in Humans and Other Species (181 WoS citations, 228 GS citations).Also discussed in: Berry DA, Stangl D. Bayesian Biostatistics. Marcel Dekker, 1996; Stangl DK and Berry DA. eds. Meta Analysis in Medicine and Health Policy. Marcel Dekker, 2000; Stevens A, Abrams K, Brazier J, Fitzpatrick R, Lilford R, eds., The Advanced Handbook of Methods in Evidence Based Healthcare. SAGE Publications, 2001; Spiegelhalter DJ, Abrams KR, Myles JP. Bayesian Approaches to Clinical Trials and Health-Care Evaluation. Wiley 2004; Cooper H, Hedges LV, Valentine JC., eds., The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis. Russell Sage Foundation, 2009; Welton NJ, Sutton AJ, Cooper NJ, Abrams KR, Ades AE, eds., Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making in Healthcare. Wiley, 2012; Koricheva J, Gurevitch J, Mengersen K, eds., Handbook of Meta-analysis in Ecology and Evolution. Princeton University Press, 2013; Gelman A, Carlin JB, Stern HS, Dunson DB, Vehtari A, Rubin DB. Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd Edition, CRC Press, 2014. As recounted by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne in The Theory That Would Not Die,McGrayne SB, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. Yale University Press, 2012. pp. 215-216. "Several civilian researchers tackling hitherto intractable problems concerning public health, sociology, epidemiology, and image restoration did experiment during the 1980s with computers for Bayes. A major controversy about the effect of diesel engine emissions on air quality and cancer inspired the first attempt. By the 1980s cancer specialists had solid data about the effects of cigarette smoke on people, laboratory animals, and cells but little accurate information about diesel fumes. William H. DuMouchel from MIT’s mathematics department and Jeffrey E. Harris from its economics department and Massachusetts General Hospital teamed up in 1983 to ask, 'Could you borrow and extrapolate and take advantage of information from non-human species for humans?' ... Thanks to mice and hamster studies, DuMouchel and Harris were able to conclude that even if light-duty diesel vehicles captured a 25% market share over 20 years, the risk of lung cancer would be negligible for the typical urban resident compared to the typical pack-a-day cigarette smoker. ... Today, Bayesian meta-analyses are statistically old hat, but DuMouchel and Harris made Bayesians salivate for more big-data methods—and for the computing power to deal with them."
Cigarette smoking among successive birth cohorts (1983)