Industrial Organization III

3 units

This PhD course surveys research in the industrial organization of health care and health insurance markets, with an emphasis on the most recent influential papers in the field. Potential topics covered during the term may include selection and moral hazard in insurance markets, choice frictions and plan design, hospital competition and provider market power, vertical integration across insurers, providers, and pharmacy benefit managers, physician agency and labor markets, quality disclosure and pay-for-performance, pharmaceutical pricing and innovation, and the design of public programs such as Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, Medicaid, and the ACA exchanges. Because health care markets cannot be understood apart from the institutions underpinning them, each topic is paired with the relevant institutional background — how prices are actually set, how claims are actually paid, how regulators actually intervene — so that students can read and write papers that have practical relevance. The course is designed to prepare students to produce original research: we will work through recent papers in depth, replicate and extend empirical exercises, and develop a research proposal suitable as the foundation of a dissertation chapter. No previous background in health care or health economics is required.