Awards and Scholarship Programs

Kathleen McGarry

Kathleen McGarry is a Professor of Economics at UCLA and a Research Associate at the NBER. From 2007-2009 she was the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt, 1972 Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and previously served as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. She has had fellowships from the Brookdale Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on the economics of aging. Her work centers on two primary topics: the role of public and private transfers in affecting the well-being of the elderly, and the functioning of insurance markets catering to the elderly population.

Read her UCLA bio

Heather Royer

Heather Royer is an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of California-Santa Barbara and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Professor Royer's research focuses primarily on how education affects health. Her recent projects examine how information and incentives may affect health behavior. Her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Read her UC Santa Barbara bio

Douglas Almond

Douglas Almond is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics & School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) of Columbia University. He has been an NBER member since 2004, served as a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration, and studied the health effects of air pollution in China as a Fulbright scholar. Almond’s research centers on the determinants and consequences of early childhood health; work in progress explores the link between the health improvements described above and subsequent adult health and economic outcomes.

Read his NBER bio

Lena Edlund

Lena Edlund is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics of Columbia University. Edlund’s research focuses on the economics of gender and family, interests that have also led her to evolutionary biology and life-history analysis. Her current research focuses on maternal conditions and child outcomes.

Read her Columbia bio

Seth Seabury and David Powell: "Using Earnings to Evaluate the Cost Effectiveness of Medical Care"

This project will use the adoption of utilization review in the California workers' compensation system to evaluate the effectiveness of medical spending on patients. In 2004, California implemented utilization review for medical care in workers' compensation claims that led to a dramatic decline in the utilization of care for patients with low back pain. We use administrative data on workers' compensation claims to estimate the impact of the adoption of these policies on the earnings of injured workers. A key advantage of this approach is that we do not need to rely on arbitrary valuations of mortality or morbidity to assess cost-effectiveness. By focusing exclusively on the economic impact of spending, we provide an unambiguous lower bound on the benefits of additional medical care.

Peter Huckfeldt: "Consumer Directed Health Plans and Price Transparency: Increasing Health Care Consumerism?"

Health care costs have been rising faster than gross domestic product for over four decades, and reversing this trend or "bending the cost curve" has become a national priority. One proposed approach is to improve the transparency of health care prices, encouraging consumers to "price shop" for medical goods and services, and thereby reduce price inflation. Consumer directed health plans (CDHPs), characterized by high deductibles and personal health accounts, were introduced to provide consumers with the information tools to improve price transparency as well as the financial incentives to make cost conscious choices. Proponents argue that CDHPs better align the incentives of health plan holders with those of insurers, and thus reduce unnecessary health care costs and encourage appropriate use of care. This research examines the extent to which consumers shift utilization to lower cost medical products and services once enrolling in CDHPs, and the degree to which this varies across products and services with more and less price transparency. We will also examine how the accessibility of information support tools influences price-shopping behavior.