AP-NORC Center Experts

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, the College and the Harris School, as well as the Director of the Becker Friedman Institute and the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. Greenstone’s research is largely focused on uncovering the benefits and costs of environmental quality and society’s energy choices. His current work is particularly focused on testing innovative ways to increase energy access and improve the efficiency of environmental regulations around the world. Additionally, he is producing empirically grounded estimates of the local and global impacts of climate change as a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab. He also created the Air Quality Life Index that provides a measure of the gain in life expectancy communities would experience if their particulates air pollution concentrations are brought into compliance with global or national standards.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

Louise Hawkley is a principal research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the role of psychosocial factors, particularly loneliness and social isolation, in explaining individual differences in health and well-being in older adulthood. Her current work on the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) is funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Prior to her position at the NORC, she was Director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago where she was an investigator on NIA-funded studies of loneliness and its antecedents and consequences in middle to older adulthood. She was also a co-investigator on a randomized clinical trial funded by the Department of the Army to evaluate the effects of a social resilience intervention on Soldiers’ job performance and health outcomes. She has given invited lectures and panel presentations for academic and service institutions in Spain, Hungary, France, England, as well as the United States. Hawkley is a member of the American Society on Aging and the Gerontological Society of America

Joshua Gottlieb is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research in applied microeconomics focuses on the economics of the health care system, including the organization of insurance markets, physician behavior, administrative costs, and implications for labor economics. Gottlieb also conducts research in public finance more broadly, including urban and health economics. He is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gottlieb has published in academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Labor Economics. He won the 2015 Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics and the 2012 National Tax Association Dissertation Award for this work.

Gottlieb’s research focuses on questions directly relevant to public policy. He was instrumental in developing and promoting a novel property tax scheme, which influenced housing policy in British Columbia.

Gottlieb completed his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 2012. He was previously an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University.

René Bautista is a principal research scientist in the Statistics and Methodology department at NORC and director of the General Social Survey. His academic training in Survey Methodology and work on sources of measurement error in surveys provides him with a solid theoretical and scientific approach to conduct applied survey research. Bautista has substantial experience developing and implementing major surveys and conducting leading methodological. His research focuses on nonresponse, measurement error, interviewer effects, mixed modes, and data collection methods.

During his tenure at NORC, Bautista has worked on program evaluations including the Census Integrated Communications Program Evaluation in 2010, commissioned by the U.S. Census Bureau, to evaluate the success of the communication campaign implemented prior to the Decennial Census. In particular, the evaluation utilized a mixed survey design (longitudinal and cross-sectional) and aimed to collect information among minority groups. In this project, Bautista advised on strategies to establish statistical significance of key survey estimates. He was responsible for conducting significance testing and multivariate analysis using complex variance estimation techniques. Also, he has participated in other studies commissioned to NORC, such as the evaluation of the Survey of Crime Victimization (SCV) conducted on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, where he conducted cognitive interviews and provided guidance on significance testing of experimental data.

Bautista has provided statistical consulting to the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), a project conducted on behalf of the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE). As the first major study of child care and education in the U.S. in over 20 years and largest-ever data collection effort conducted by NORC, Bautista’s work on this project highlights his commitment to generate data of the highest quality and an appreciation of the functions the survey data serve. He continues to contribute to the NSECE team on sampling methodologies for the 2019 NSECE.

Bautista has also provided senior survey methodology advice on questionnaire design and cognitive testing for the 2012 National Survey on Health Information Exchange in Clinical Laboratories, a project commissioned by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. This study evaluates capabilities of laboratories in the U.S. to exchange information using electronic means.

In 2014, Bautista was also a key contributor to the re-design of the National Survey of Children’s Health and the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs by overseeing adaptation of survey instruments (English and Spanish) for the change in data collection strategy from a CATI instrument to a self-administered instrument (paper- and web-based).

In 2015, he was the lead methodologist for one the Task Orders through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services related to adding new questions to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). He led the effort to understand how limited English proficiency (LEP) may impede access to healthcare. This work has meant developing and testing new LEP items and measures that reach well beyond used historically by government agencies.

In 2017, Bautista served as Director for the Worker Voice Study, a survey commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, aiming to collect information among 4,000 workers across the country.

Previously, he worked at the Gallup Research Center at the University of Nebraska. Bautista has also consulted as Election Night Analyst with Edison Media Research –exclusive provider of exit polling data to ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News and the Associated Press.

Bautista, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has published scholarly work in peer-reviewed journals and books, and is a frequent presenter in major national and international conferences on survey methodology. He holds an academic appointments as lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris Graduate School of Public Policy and affiliate faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Survey Research and Methodology Program. He currently serves as Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. He is an elected member of AAPOR’s Executive Council and serves as Associate Chair/Chair-Elect for the AAPOR Standards Committee.