Biography:
Dr. Jason Fletcher is a Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he holds the title of Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs, and serves as the Director of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. His research spans health economics, the economics of education, social genomics, and child and adolescent health policy. Dr. Fletcher is particularly known for his work on social network effects on education and health outcomes, as well as the interplay between genetics and social settings in youth development.
A recipient of numerous honors, Dr. Fletcher was awarded the William T. Grant Foundation Young Scholars Award in 2012 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 for his work on U.S. mortality. His research has been published in several leading journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Health Economics, Demography, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and he is also the co-author of "The Genome Factor," a book exploring the social genomics revolution.
Dr. Fletcher earned his B.S. in Economics and Public Administration, summa cum laude, from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville in 2000. From there, he went on to complete his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2003 and 2006, respectively
Student Lecture: 8 May 2025
Uncovering Secrets To Living Longer From Measuring Childhood Experiences
This lecture will explore the gains in life expectancy and longevity in the US over the past 100 years and consider new evidence for additional gains that may be rooted in childhood exposures in the distant past. Big data and new econometric methods can expand our knowledge.
Faculty Lecture: 9 May 2025
Moving Forward by Looking Back: New Evidence that Early Life Shapes our Lifespan
The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis proposes an important link between social/environmental conditions experienced early in life and old age health. Early conditions “program” our body’s response to challenges—famine conditions experienced in utero signal the developing organs and brain to store scarce energy; this programming leads to obesity and diabetes when the individual faces an environment with unlimited calories. However, discovering these important links with current data faces the challenge of needing data spanning ~80+ years to capture early life and old age; and we need ‘big data’ to find complex effects. We have no such data available. Our team makes use of newly released big data from the US Historical Census that captures early life linked to recent mortality records in order to overcome these challenges. Our results suggest widespread effects of early exposures on old age longevity—ranging from pesticide exposure to racial violence in the early 1900s linked with longevity through 2005. Further, our results suggest that these widespread, but individually modest-in-size, longevity effects require big data to be discovered—they would go undiscovered in available survey data on the health of older US adults because these survey data are too small.