Prof. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine and Senior Fellow by Courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a Director of the university’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
His research focuses on the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effects of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. He has published empirical economics and health services research on the elderly, adolescents, HIV/AIDS and managed care. Most recently, he has researched the regulation of the viatical-settlements market (a secondary life-insurance market that often targets HIV patients) and summer/winter differences in nutritional outcomes for low-income American families. He is also working on a project examining the labor-market conditions that help determine why some U.S. employers do not provide health insurance.
He worked for three years as an economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., where he also taught health economics as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He received a BA in economics, an MD and a PhD from Stanford University.
Professor Bhattacharya’s co-author, Jonathan Ketcham, Ph.D., is the Earl G. and Gladys C. Davis Distinguished Research Professor in Business in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He uses economics and econometrics to study the U.S. healthcare system, with an emphasis on how incentives and information affect choices made by patients and physicians. He has published extensively and collaborated widely across academia, industry, and government. He earned a B.A in Economics from Baylor University and a Ph.D. in Health Care Systems from The Wharton School of Business and was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley.