Research

Katherine Baicker, PhD, is Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.  She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

From 2005-2007, Professor Baicker served as a Senate-confirmed Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where she played a leading role in the development of health policy.  She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Health Affairs, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Forum for Health Economics and Policy; on the Board of Directors of AcademyHealth; on the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Health Advisers; as a Commissioner on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America; and on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Health Insurance Status and Its Consequences.

Professor Baicker's research focuses primarily on the factors that drive the distribution, generosity, and effectiveness of public and private health insurance, with a particular focus on health insurance finance and the effect of reforms on the distribution and quality of care.  Her research has been published in journals such as Health Affairs, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and on National Public Radio.  She is currently one of the leaders of a research program investigating the many effects of expanding health insurance coverage in Oregon.

She received her BA in economics from Yale in 1993 and her PhD in economics from Harvard in 1998.  She has served on the faculty of the Department of Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago; the Economics Department at Dartmouth College; and the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences and the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School.

Education

BA Yale University, 1993

PhD Harvard University, 1998

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