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, 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, the economics of smoking and public policy toward the tobacco industry, HIV/AIDS, health economics, as well as economics and statistics generally. He is author of Deadly Choices: Coping with Health Risks in Everyday Life.
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. This article (294 Web of Science (WoS) citations, 928 Google Scholar (GS) citations) was subsequently reproduced in several collections, including Williamson's Markets and Hierarchies (1975). The article has been described as "the first explicit application of the new institutional economics to internal labor markets."
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. Reproduced in several collections, 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."
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). As recounted by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne in The Theory That Would Not Die, "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) Motivated by his contributions to the 1979 and 1980 Surgeon General’s Reports, Harris developed a method to reconstruct the smoking rates of successive birth cohorts of men and women throughout the 20th century, based upon individual smoking histories reported in large-scale cross-section surveys. The resulting article, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1983 (148 Wos citations, 210 GS citations), spawned a series of studies tracking the birth cohort-specific relationships between smoking rates and disease incidence.