Intended for

Academics, researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in incentives, markets, competition, and regulation in health care.

Prerequisites

First year Master or PhD level coursework in microeconomics and econometrics.

Overview

The objective of this course is to cover key questions and methodological approaches to analyzing two key issues in the industrial organization of health care: competition in health care markets and optimal payment methods for health care providers, with the ultimate goal of providing participants with important background, perspective, and ideas to incorporate into their own research. Participants will become familiar with key concepts and analytic approaches in the industrial organization of health care, learn how to critically evaluate research in this area, and develop tools and generate ideas for their own research. The basic structure of the course will involve presentation and discussion of papers that should be read in advance. Participants will also have opportunities to present and discuss their own research ideas and projects.

Topics

Optimal health insurance
The optimality of competition in health care markets
Competition in health care markets with administered prices
Optimal payments to health care providers

Martin Gaynor is the E.J. Barone University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and was Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2013-2014. He is one of the founders of the Health Care Cost Institute, an independent non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing knowledge about U.S. health care spending and served as the first Chair of its governing board. He is also an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and of the U.S. National Academy of Social Insurance, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an International Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, and served as President of the American Society of Health Economists in 2020-2021.

Professor Gaynor received his B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1983. He has previously taught at Johns Hopkins University and a number of other universities and been an invited visitor to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Toulouse School of Economics, Imperial College London, and Northwestern University. His research focuses on incentives, competition, and antitrust policy, both in health care markets, and more generally. This work has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, the RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics, and other outlets.

Professor Gaynor is the recipient of the NIHCM Foundation Health Care Research Award (for best published research on health policy and management) in 2018 and 2005, the Kenneth J. Arrow Award (for best published article worldwide in health economics) in 2017 and 1996, the Best Paper Award from the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy in 2016, was a finalist for the Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship in 2014, received the 2007 Victor R. Fuchs Award (for the best paper with the potential to spawn new research in an underdeveloped area of health economics or health policy), and is a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. In addition, he has testified before the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and advised the governments of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and South Africa on competition issues.