Mark Anderson fosters passion for economic research

On an average day in Mark Anderson’s Honors 251: Economics class, he begins by asking: “Someone pick a topic, any topic.” After a brief pause, a student might call out “hockey” or “fast food.” Anderson then proceeds to find an economics paper or research question related to the topic and explain it thoroughly.

Anderson said he first became interested in economics in a very roundabout way. He enrolled at MSU in 2005, intending to get an undergraduate degree in mathematics, but his father — whom he called “an armchair economist” — encouraged him to take an economics class. 

“Finally — so he would stop bothering me — in my junior year I was like, alright, I’ll take an economics class,” he said.

This first class sparked Anderson’s love for economics and he later decided to double major in mathematics and economics. After achieving his B.S. from MSU, he attended the University of Washington (UW) and received an M.A. in economics. He continued his education shortly after, returning to UW to pursue his P.h.D in economics, which he completed in 2011.

Anderson has been a faculty member at MSU in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics since receiving his P.h.D. In addition to Honors economics, he currently teaches microeconomics and the economic history of the U.S., among other classes.

Anderson said that he began studying reduced-form applied microeconomics in graduate school. This refers to a style of research that asks a simple economics-related question and then tries to create a controlled experiment or example that shows what caused the problem that sparked the question, according to Anderson.

“Most of my research focuses on the public health determinants of the urban mortality transition [in the] 20th-century U.S.,” he said. Urban mortality transition in this context refers to the fact that in the Western world mortality rates have plummeted and life expectancy has risen dramatically, as Anderson explains in a paper he co-authored with Kerwin Kofi Charles and Daniel I. Rees in 2019. 

Anderson’s view of what a promising upcoming researcher looks like has changed over the years. “I originally thought that it was going to be the students that were the most technical or analytical or who had the most mathematical horsepower and that’s not necessarily the case,” he said. 

“I’m much more likely to be drawn to a student if I see that they are really excited about a particular research question of their own and if it appears that they’re willing to dig really, really deep into that,” he said. “So math aside, statistics aside, all of those technical skills aside — if you're not really excited about the material within which you're trying to do research, you're probably not gonna get very far.”

Anderson explained that, in his teaching he encourages students to think like researchers. That is why he begins class by asking students to name a topic.

In his time in academia, Anderson has been published in numerous journals including the American Economics Journal, the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Urban Economics. He has researched various topics, such as drug and alcohol policies, politics, mortality rates and public health campaigns.

When Anderson is not teaching or researching, he spends a lot of time with his two children and his passion for economics has rubbed off on his five-year-old daughter. He explained that she became interested in learning about infectious diseases after they discussed the study of health economics. 

“She can tell you things like which infectious diseases are viral versus bacterial. And she was walking her mom through this pie chart that we looked at the other day on the five pathogens that are most common across human history,” Anderson said.

To view Anderson’s published research and working papers, visit https://www.dmarkanderson.com/research.html.