Jonathan Kolstad PhD

Jonathan Kolstad, PhD, is a professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at Berkeley Haas and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also the faculty director of the Center for Healthcare Marketplace Innovation(opens in a new tab) and co-director of the Health Initiative at the UC Berkeley Opportunity Lab.

He is an economist whose research interests lie at the intersection of health economics, industrial organization, and public economics. He is particularly interested in finding new models and unique data that can account for the complexity of markets in health care, notably the role of information asymmetries and incentives. He has studied the impact of quality information on demand, as well as intrinsic surgeon incentives. In a series of papers, he has evaluated the impact of the Massachusetts health insurance expansion on a variety of outcomes. He has also gathered unique data to understand the role of information frictions in consumer decision-making in insurance markets and on medical treatments.

Kolstad was awarded the Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for the best paper in health economics in 2014 and the NIHCM Foundation Research Award in 2016. He is also a Co-founder and was Chief Data Scientist at Picwell. He received his PhD from Harvard University and BA from Stanford University.