In even a short conversation, Ken Chay projects that he is firmly grounded in reality. With his down-to-earth personality, Chay emphasizes the importance of focusing on relevant, real-world issues in his academic work. While his broad research interests include labor, health, and environmental economics,  Chay strings them together by concentrating on racial differences within those fields.

Chay’s recent research includes a paper that seeks to estimate the effect of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the gap between white and Black infant mortality rates. While there was evidence that this discrepancy was decreasing throughout the South, Chay indicates that he focused on one state – Mississippi – to eliminate competing explanations for the findings. The data showed a decrease in deaths among Blacks that were caused by treatable illnesses, such as diarrhea and pneumonia. Through the desegregation of hospitals by the civil rights intervention, Blacks could receive the appropriate, yet simple, treatments that were available only in hospitals.

This paper, as well as another that focuses on the effects of pollution agents on infant health, required knowledge outside of economics, such as medicine, epidemiology, and environmental science. Demonstrating a commitment to applying his skills to real-world issues, which usually requires a multi-disciplinary approach, Chay often has to read a lot of material outside of the field and talk to people with other areas of expertise.

To guide his academic work, Chay holds the belief that research is as good as the quality of the data and the research design. Perhaps the most extensive economic data available are the labor information collected by the government, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and the Current Population Survey, which are accessible on-line. Also useful to Chay in his research are data from the National Center for Health, which rival the labor data in scope and are available through tapes that must be ordered from the NCH.  While Chay often finds himself being asked about the stock market and the possibility of a recession, he feels that the discipline of economics has a much broader scope than most people realize. Drawing a line between analysis and advocacy, Chay explains that scholarship “is about finding the truth,” rather than finding the explanation that one wants to believe. Chay’s laid-back personality and his drive to make economics relevant are invaluable and refreshing characteristics in any economist.