Katherine Baicker, PhD
C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics
Department of Health Policy and Management
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Research Associate
National Bureau of Economic Research
Biography
Katherine Baicker, PhD, is Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine.
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 serves on the Editorial Boards of Health Affairs, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives; as a Director of Eli Lilly; as past Chair of the Board of Directors of AcademyHealth; on the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission; on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers; and as a Commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
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 the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Health Affairs, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio. She is currently one of the leaders of a research program investigating the many effects of expanding health insurance coverage in the context of a randomized Medicaid expansion in Oregon.
She received her BA in economics from Yale and her PhD in economics from Harvard. 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.