I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School working alongside Professor Mark Shepard on U.S. health insurance market design.
My research focuses on global health care markets and health insurance in the United States, using tools from industrial organization, health economics and development economics.
I have five years of policy-making experience in health, housing, and disaster reconstruction at the World Bank, UNDP, and Harvard T.H. Chan School.
I received a Ph.D. in Health Systems and Economics from Harvard in 2024, and B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Nottingham.
Working Papers:
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Competing Complements in Public-Private Hospital Markets
Public provision in markets can either crowd out or crowd in private investment through competition or complementarities. This paper shows this tension in the Malaysian hospital market. I exploit the staggered construction of public hospitals between 1996 and 2013 to identify causal effects on private hospital entry. I find that public hospitals affect private entrants through two channels: direct competition for patients and indirect complementarity through expanded specialist physician supply. The net effect depends on the magnitude of specialist spillovers. Specialist public hospitals generate sufficient spillovers to crowd in private hospitals, while non-specialist hospitals crowd out entrants. Using a model, I estimate that a new specialist public hospital reduces private fixed operational costs by 44 percent but captures 46 percent of market share post-entry. These findings show how public provision competes and complements private investment, with implications for markets where public and private provision coexist.
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Hospital Allocation and Politicians: Evidence from Malaysia
[ Abstract ] [ Draft ] - Comments welcome!Equitable access to healthcare requires efficient allocation of health infrastructure, yet politics may distort these decisions. This paper studies how politicians distort public hospital allocations in postcolonial Malaysia from 1959 to 2013. Malaysia first allocates hospital funding to districts, then selects specific locations within funded districts for construction. Using six decades of data on hospital construction and elections, I find that constituencies represented by deputy ministers are significantly more likely to receive new hospitals, but only at the location selection stage within districts. District-level funding decisions effectively direct resources to districts far from existing hospitals. I provide suggestive evidence that measurable guidelines for funding decisions exist but not for construction site selection. These results suggest that defining clear guidelines in hospital allocation can limit political distortions.
Publications:
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Consumer Choice and Public-Private Providers: The Role of Perceived Prices (with Wei Aun Yap and Winnie Yip). Health Economics 2022.
Governments often encourage health service providers to improve quality of care and reduce prices through competition. The efficacy of competition hinges on the assumption that consumers demand high quality care at low prices for any given health condition. In this paper, we examine this assumption by investigating the role of perceived price and quality on consumer choice for four different health conditions across public and private providers. We use a nationally representative survey in Malaysia to elicit respondents' perception on prices and quality, and their preferred choice of provider. We estimate a mixed logit model and show that consumers value different dimensions of quality depending on the health condition. Furthermore, increasing perceived prices for private providers reduces demand for minor, more frequent health conditions such as flu fever or cough, but increases demand for more complex, severe conditions such as coronary artery bypass graft. These findings provide empirical support for price regulation which differentiates the severity of underlying health conditions.
Selected Work-In-Progress:
- Strategic Auto-Enrollment and Health Insurance Market Design (with Mark Shepard and Myles Wagner).
- Word-of-Mouth in Low-Income Health Care Markets (with Bijetri Bose and Terence Cheng).