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NBER Health Econ
Boot Camp
This intensive workshop is designed for economics Ph.D. students who have completed their coursework and are beginning or conducting research in health economics. The program provides an introduction into selected research topics that intersect with industrial organization, public economics, and behavioral economics. The workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and is organized by Professor Ben Handel of the University of California – Berkeley and NBER.
The program over the past two iterations consisted of fifteen hours of research presentations by experienced and active researchers, including David Chan (Stanford), Amitabh Chandra (Harvard), Leemore Dafny (Harvard), Amy Finkelstein (MIT), Jonathan Gruber (MIT), Ben Handel (Berkeley), Katherine Ho (Princeton), Jonathan Kolstad (Berkeley), Sendhil Mullainathan (Chicago), Ziad Obermeyer (Berkeley), Emily Oster (Brown), Joshua Schwartzstein (Harvard), and John Van Reenen (MIT).
The boot camp is designed to promote research interest in health economics. It is particularly well suited for Ph.D. students in economics who are either considering, or already doing, research in this area. Participants must have successfully completed the first year of their Ph.D. program. Those in the second, third, and fourth years of their respective programs will be given priority for participation, although advanced Ph.D. students who are well along on dissertation research may also apply. Participants are expected to carefully prepare for the workshop by reading a set of approximately twenty background papers. Approximately 70 Ph.D. students total nationwide have participated during the first two iterations of this workshop.
Health Economics
(ECON 157)
Economics 157 is an advanced undergraduate course on the economics of health care provision and payment. In addition to being one of the most important “goods” consumed in our lives, health care spending accounts for almost 20% of GDP in the United States. How we choose to provide and pay for health care has large and direct welfare impacts on the consumers and producers of health care nationwide while also being key ingredients into overall national economic performance.
In this course we will use methods from microeconomics to investigate how different aspects of the health care system function and to assess the implications for different policies designed to improve that functioning. We will use economic tools and techniques from the sub-disciplines of information economics, industrial organization, labor economics, public economics, behavioral economics, and decision theory to think about these questions. The primary goals of the course will be to (i) master different economic techniques in the context of health care markets and (ii) learn about the specific institutional details and policies relevant to those markets.
Industrial Organization
(ECON 220A)
This course provides a graduate-level introduction to Industrial Organization (IO), with a focus on empirical methods and applications. It is designed to introduce Ph.D. students to a variety of methods, topics, and industries in the field with the goal of preparing them to conduct thesis research in this area. The methods and topics may be of interest to graduate students in other sub-fields of economics. Students interested in this class should also strongly consider taking ECO 220C, a second empirical industrial organization class, also taught in the spring.