Health Economics Workshop with Kate Ho, PhD (co-hosted by Wharton’s Health Care Management Dept. and the Penn Economics Dept.)

Kate Ho is a Professor of Economics, and co-director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing, at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the industrial organization of the medical care market: she studies the interactions between firms (particularly health insurers and providers such as hospitals); their effects on the price and quality of care provided; and the impact of market design and regulations on these outcomes. For example, a recent project (co-authored with Robin Lee) develops and estimates a framework to assess the impact of insurer competition on negotiated hospital prices, premiums charged to consumers, and welfare. This paper was published in Econometrica in 2017. A related paper, also co-authored with Robin Lee and published in the American Economic Review, uses a model of hospital network formation to investigate the impact of regulating the breadth of insurers’ networks on hospital prices, premiums, and hence consumer surplus. A paper written with Fiona Scott Morton and Joe Hogan and published in the RAND Journal of Economics demonstrates that consumer inattention in the Medicare Part D market causes search frictions that prevent enrollees from switching away from relative high-priced plans. Reduced consumer inertia would both benefit consumers directly and remove a barrier to effective price competition between plans that would save both consumers and the government significant sums.

Professor Ho is a co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and has served on the editorial board of the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and the Journal of Economic Literature. Her work has been recognized by the International Health Economics Association and the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Prior to her academic career she spent four years as private secretary (Chief of Staff) to the U.K. Minister of State for Health.

This event is free and open to the public, but please register.

Click here to view the full list of Health Economics Workshops.