Explaining disparities: bringing together approaches from epidemiology and economics under a causal framework

John Jackson, ScD

Assistant Professor

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Two of the most popular tools to describe how factors contribute to disparities are mediation analysis (from epidemiology) and the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (from economics). In this talk, I will review their different inferential goals and introduce a unifying perspective under the potential outcomes framework. The approach will be demonstrated using an example from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, considering the contribution of childhood socioeconomic status and educational attainment to disparities in wages, incarceration, and health in adulthood. Dr. John W. Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology (primary) and Mental Health (secondary) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research primarily focuses on developing methods to identify, refine, evaluate, and translate interventions that address health and healthcare disparities. He also develops tools to make causal inference methods more transparent.