Working Papers

• Experience Effects and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Aortic Valve Replacement, Job Market Paper.

Abstract: There have been concerted efforts in the medical profession to centralize certain surgical procedures in hopes that patients can benefit from treatment at hospitals with extensive experience or recent practice. In 2012, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced minimum volume requirements that hospitals must satisfy to receive reimbursement for a new surgical procedure, transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). I examine the desirability of this regulation and the trade-offs that CMS faces between enhanced learning-by-doing, reduced patient access to hospitals offering TAVR, and fixed adoption costs. Using Medicare claims data, I find that doubling hospital experience reduces TAVR in-hospital mortality by one-sixth. I then develop and estimate a dynamic industry equilibrium model with learning-by-doing, patient choice, and hospital TAVR adoption. Counterfactual simulation shows that removing the policy restriction would have increased adoptions at hospitals that are relatively less desirable to patients. Further, this small access gain would be offset by reduced learning-by-doing and higher mortality. Overall, relative to the free-adoption counterfactual, the current Medicare policy achieves the same technology utilization and total consumer welfare with 13% lower fixed costs, thus improving social welfare.

Publications

• O-Ring Production Networks

(with Banu Demir, Cecilia Fieler, and Daniel Xu), Journal of Political Economy, 132(1), 2024.

• What Happens When Private Equity Firms Buy Hospitals

(with Marcelo Cerullo, Karen Joynt Maddox, Anaeze C. Offodile II, Ryan McDevitt, and James Roberts), Harvard Business Review, 2023.

• Association Between Hospital Private Equity Acquisition and Outcomes of Acute Medical Conditions Among Medicare Beneficiaries

(with Marcelo Cerullo, Karen Joynt Maddox, Anaeze C. Offodile II, Ryan McDevitt, and James Roberts), JAMA Network Open, 5(4), 2022.

• Private Equity Acquisition and Responsiveness to Service-Line Profitability at Short-Term Acute Care Hospitals

(with Marcelo Cerullo, Anaeze C. Offodile II, Ryan McDevitt, and James Roberts), Health Affairs, 40(11), 2021.

Teaching

Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

• Instructor, Predictive Analytics for Business Strategy (BA), Spring 2024.

• Instructor, Econometric Methods in Business II (PhD), Spring 2024.

Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

• Teaching Assistant, Health Care Markets (MBA), Spring 2021.

• Teaching Assistant, Empirical Analysis for Strategy (MSc), Winter 2021.

• Teaching Assistant, Managerial Economics (MSc), Fall 2020.

Department of Economics, Duke University

• Teaching Assistant, Applied Econometrics in Microeconomics (MA), Spring 2020.