About

Jason Fletcher is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with appointments in Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences. He specializes in health economics, economics of education, social genomics, and child and adolescent health policy. His research focuses on examining social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, combining genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and investigating how in utero and early life conditions influence later life health, cognition, and mortality. Professor Fletcher is affiliated with the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Center for Demography on Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Group at the University of Chicago. He earned a B.S. in economics and public administration from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville (Summa Cum Laude) and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. In 2012, he received a career development award from the William T. Grant Foundation to study the interplay between genetics and social settings in youth development. His recent publications have appeared in prominent journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Health Economics, and Demography. He is also the author of the book 'The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History and Our Future,' published by Princeton University Press.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Medicine
• Demography
• Biology
• Psychiatry
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Gerontology
• Genetics
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• Estimating genetic nurture with summary statistics of multigenerational genome-wide association studies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 60 citations

  • Biology
  • Genetics

  Marginal effect estimates in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are mixtures of direct and indirect genetic effects. Existing methods to dissect these effects require family-based, individual-level genetic, and phenotypic data with large samples, which is difficult to obtain in practice. Here, we propose a statistical framework to estimate direct and indirect genetic effects using summary statistics from GWAS conducted on own and offspring phenotypes. Applied to birth weight, our method showed nearly identical results with those obtained using individual-level data. We also decomposed direct and indirect genetic effects of educational attainment (EA), which showed distinct patterns of genetic correlations with 45 complex traits. The known genetic correlations between EA and higher height, lower body mass index, less-active smoking behavior, and better health outcomes were mostly explained by the indirect genetic component of EA. In contrast, the consistently identified genetic correlation of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with higher EA resides in the direct genetic component. A polygenic transmission disequilibrium test showed a significant overtransmission of the direct component of EA from healthy parents to ASD probands. Taken together, we demonstrate that traditional GWAS approaches, in conjunction with offspring phenotypic data collection in existing cohorts, could greatly benefit studies on genetic nurture and shed important light on the interpretation of genetic associations for human complex traits.

  DOI

• The effects of education on cognition in older age: Evidence from genotyped Siblings

  Social Science & Medicine · 2021 · 73 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Gerontology
  DOI

• Undue Burden Beyond Texas: An Analysis of Abortion Clinic Closures, Births, and Abortions in Wisconsin

  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 2020 · 50 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Medicine
  • Demography

  Abstract In this paper, we estimate the impacts of abortion clinic closures on access to clinics in terms of distance and congestion, abortion rates, and birth rates. Between 2010 and 2017, Wisconsin passed three laws regulating abortion providers and two of five abortion clinics closed in Wisconsin, increasing the distance to the nearest clinic to 55 miles on average and to over 100 miles in the most affected counties. We use a difference‐in‐differences design to estimate the effect of changes in travel distance on births and abortions, using within‐county variation across time in distance to identify the effect. We find that a 100‐mile increase in distance to the nearest clinic is associated with 30.7 percent fewer abortions and 3.2 percent more births. We see no significant effect of increased congestion at remaining clinics on abortion rates. Interacting the legislative changes with distance, we find that the effects of distance on abortion are approximately 1.33 time stronger in the presence of laws requiring multiple physician visits to obtain an abortion. Our results suggest that even small numbers of clinic closures can result in significant restrictions to abortion access of similar magnitude to those seen in Texas where a greater number of clinics ceased operations.

  DOI

Recent grants

• The Impacts of Early Neighborhoods on Racial Disparities in Adult Health Outcomes

  NIH · $300k · 2016–2018

• The Importance of Place in Determining Health and Mortality at Older Ages

  NIH · $2.2M · 2018–2024

• NIH Grant R21HD066230

  NIH · $476k · 2013

• Center for Demography of Health and Aging

  NIH · $8.4M · 1999–2027

• The Importance of Place of Birth in Determining Old Age Cognitive Health

  NIH · $1.6M · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Barbara Wolfe

  69 shared

• Stephen A. Ross

  University of Victoria

  66 shared

• Qiongshi Lu

  48 shared

• Jinho Kim

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  32 shared

• Jody L. Sindelar

  Yale University

  32 shared

• Yuchang Wu

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  30 shared

• Alfonso Flores‐Lagunes

  Syracuse University

  28 shared

• Hamid Noghanibehambari

  25 shared

Awards & honors

• 2012 William T. Grant Foundation Career Development Award

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