Celebrating 100 Published Research Papers for LEO’s Bill Evans and his Lifelong, Generous, and Joyful Commitment to Curiosity
One of the more interesting parts of writing a story about a man who has published his 100th research paper is that the story is not about him. At least, that’s what I promised him. It’s a story about how an economist’s joy is found in the work of learning. And how, when pairing a dogged persistence of answering social questions with a community of vibrant and curious intellects, a legacy like this gets built, paper by paper.
And to be clear, reaching 100 publications is no easy feat. As Jim Sullivan, Bill’s fellow LEO co-founder tells me, “Very few economists publish 100 papers in their career, and among those that do only a very select group publishes papers that are as impactful on the profession as Bill’s have been. His papers are very highly cited and have inspired new lines of inquiry for scores of economists.”
On Success
Part of Bill’s charm is in his earnestness that any success attributed to him rests on the backs of those who came before him and those who are charting the course ahead.
Before there was the published version, there was the Wake Forest undergraduate economics major version of Bill Evans. With four of his courses under Professor John Moorhouse, Bill tells me he majored in economics and minored in “Moorhouse.” It was within these early walls that he got his first taste of doing research, where he learned the process of discovery and how to put data together and analyze a question. Proximity—or serendipity—would bring alongside him a series of great advisors, that ultimately he would become for others as his career advanced. His path would include a masters and subsequent Ph.D. at Duke.
The Bill today starts by telling me that hopefully you learn something from every paper you write, between the subject matter itself and the research process. In his humble nature, he delightfully lifts the veil on the achievement of 100 publications.
“I’ve written a lot of papers, but I haven’t finished more,” says Bill. As authentic as his research, he tells me a lot of ideas, in many instances, go up in flames. “Sometimes there isn’t enough data; sometimes it isn’t the right data. Sometimes you’re thinking about a problem all wrong and realize that halfway through. There’s a lot of failure in this business. You have to have a short memory and a thick skin, so that when things go wrong, you retrain your efforts in another direction and start again.”
But, sometimes—maybe say 100x—it works.
The breadth and depth of his four-decade catalog is outstanding. A small deep dive into only 10% of the work will show you a range, including a study about wrap-around case management services designed to reduce poverty, the role that Purdue Pharma’s advertising of OxyContin played in the opioid crisis and how the drug’s reformulation ignited heroin use, how the emergence of crack cocaine brought gun violence to inner cities, the impact of homelessness prevention programs, excess medical diagnoses of ADHD, the effects of higher incomes on mortality, the impact of K-12 education finance reform, children and their parent’s labor supply, and peer group effects on teenage behaviors. And this doesn’t include the nearly 20,000 citations listed in others’ work.
A Degree of Happenstance
The genesis of a project, well before it even gets to paper-worthy, is something that for Bill can almost occur by happenstance. A natural and curious observer, many of the projects began simply through intriguing conversations with others in his community.
Bill describes a story from over 30 years ago about how he was walking his children down the block when he ran into a neighbor whose wife was expecting their second child. They already had a girl, and the neighbor delightedly told him they were having a boy, so now they didn’t need to plan on trying for a third child.
The conversation sparked a curiosity about the effect of children on the labor supply of women, punctuated by the fact that the majority of parents want a mix of boys and girls, and yet if the first two children are of the same gender, there is a likelihood of a third child and thus a correlated decrease in labor supply for the mother. He was working on this project with Joshua Angrist, who in 2021 won the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. When the prize was announced, a local reporter asked Angrist what his favorite paper was, and he listed this very one.
Another topic that he didn’t plan to study but followed down a rabbit hole of multiple papers published? The myriad ways drugs are changing poverty and our society.
“I got into drug research by accident,” says Bill. “I had been following long-term improvements in African American students academically that suddenly halted in the mid 1980s. Why did that happen? We thought it was the upheaval in the Black community generated by the arrival of crack.
“Since the world changes around us every day, we are always fighting the last war,” he describes. He explained how the opioid crisis started out as a prescription drug crisis. Then OxyContin was reformulated and the epidemic was suddenly a heroin crisis, so then the focus became on the heroin supply, which turned into a fentanyl crisis. His work in this realm has found its way to the likes of Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History Podcast and the New York Times, among other prominent outlets.
Yet another paper that evolved from everyday life began after Bill met with the headmaster at his kids’ school, who was bemoaning the large number of boys he thought were misdiagnosed and now on ADHD medication. Bill began a study which showed that kids who were young for their age in their grade were much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. The results of this aired on The Today Show.
And one of his favorite papers, mainly on account of getting to work with two former graduate students, is one from the early days of LEO that took a long time to complete. The Community-Based Care Transitions Program, run by Catholic Charities Chicago, aimed to reduce hospital readmission rates by sending someone to visit the patient after release to check in on food, transportation, follow-up appointments, etc. It took six years to get all the data. Bill is drawn to this level of persistence and the payoff.
In this case, the results suggested that the Chicago Southland Coalition for Transition Care program effectively reduced both hospital readmissions rates and related costs. It also significantly decreased their readmissions cost burden. And as one joy of learning leads to the next, this particular study inspired Catholic Charities West Virginia to launch the same program and LEO is currently studying it.
Motivations
With getting to what works being harder to achieve than what doesn’t, I ask him what keeps him going.
“My son was a collegiate swimmer. He swam yards and yards over hours and hours daily. You don’t do that unless you love the training. Likewise, while it’s nice to get papers published and recognized, at some level, you have to enjoy the process of generating itself; otherwise, it would be hard to keep up the excitement. I really enjoy the process of finding new facts. The whole process of discovery brings me joy.”
“My son was a collegiate swimmer. He swam yards and yards over hours and hours daily. You don’t do that unless you love the training. Likewise, while it’s nice to get papers published and recognized, at some level, you have to enjoy the process of generating itself; otherwise, it would be hard to keep up the excitement. I really enjoy the process of finding new facts. The whole process of discovery brings me joy.”
And much like the swimmers that flanked the lanes next to his son day in and day out, Bill borrows from the strengths of those around him and makes sure to pave the way for those just entering the sport.
“Academia can be lonely,” Bill says. “It’s way more fun when you can do it alongside other people.” He tells me that when you surround yourself with smart, passionate people who care about the same issues you do, it can help shape and sharpen the quality of your work. By ‘people’, he means the first-rate colleagues in the economics department at Notre Dame, the scholars at LEO, and the high-quality undergraduate and graduate students on campus.
“I’ve written 41 papers with former graduate students, and it’s one of the most fulfilling aspects of my career,” he says. He has also had eleven Notre Dame undergraduates as coauthors, including two students on his most recent and 100th published paper.
What’s more, he goes on to describe how Notre Dame has such high-quality undergraduate and graduate students, and the goal is to expose students to as much research as possible. Whether through general coursework, interning at LEO, becoming a research assistant, or working alongside them for a senior honors thesis, Bill knows it’s hard to imagine what the process of discovery is like until you do it. His M.O. is that when you are in an established role, you treat people as if they were as well.
This includes LEO’s invaluable partners. For Bill, tackling some of the most difficult social service issues of our time needs hope, and that hope looks like the many partners LEO works with every day. “There is a large army of people out there who care about poverty and are working on the frontlines trying to improve people’s lives. We just need to find them and put some empirical content on the great work they are doing.
“I have dedicated my research to worrying about some of these problems. These social service providers have dedicated their lives to it,” says Bill. “If we can use the skills that we have to help them, therein lies the joy of the job. This is really what brings you to work every day at LEO.”
“I have dedicated my research to worrying about some of these problems. These social service providers have dedicated their lives to it. If we can use the skills that we have to help them, therein lies the joy of the job. This is really what brings you to work every day at LEO.”
And Now
When I ask Bill what’s next, he says LEO’s goal is to find more projects that actively move people out of poverty, and to do so from an academic perspective. And yes, more papers. The quality of evidence and care is meaningful because it improves people’s lives. It brings light and efficacy to service providers, to LEO, to the Department of Economics, the College of Arts and Letters, and the University of Notre Dame as a whole.
“I’m eternally grateful to have been able to be a part of starting LEO in 2012 alongside Jim Sullivan,” says Bill. The pair saw a unique opportunity to use their skills as academic researchers to put some empirical content to the great work performed by local social service providers in their fight against poverty. Since LEO’s founding in 2012, LEO’s focus has been on creating evidence that impacts the way our nation addresses poverty through public policy, philanthropy, and the social service industry.
“To have LEO be so well supported by the university, donors, and the social service agencies we research is such a gift. It’s an amazing blessing to do research on a subject matter that is so important to people and the public and so central to the Catholic mission of the university. It’s a great place to be where so many goals collide,” he tells me.
As for what might tip the scales into publishing paper number one hundred and one, Bill toys around with the idea of studying why there are so many men out of the labor force in the prime working ages of 25-54. He has his theories, and he’s motivated to get to the bottom of it.
As for the long game, Bill tells me (almost too casually for the impact of what I hear him say), “You have to decide what kind of scholar you want to be. If you’re quick and dirty with your research and publishing, people will identify that. Whoever you are will come through in your writing and your work, and you hope that people will think that you are a thoughtful and clever person who is interested in the truth.”
One hundred publications in, I think those words are evidence of a very thoughtful and clever person. As LEO continues to commit to the learning and understand what works in order to outsmart poverty, it’s good to know even when facing such a complex topic, there is still joy in the job.