Welcome to my homepage. I am an Assistant Research Fellow (Assistant Professor) at Institute of Economics at Academia Sinica. I received my PhD in Economics from Pennsylvania State University, State College in 2024.

My research interests are in applied microeconomics, health economics, and industrial organization. This is a version of my CV.

Working Papers:

Performance Scores and Strategic Choices of Kidney Transplant Centers

Does the threat of punishment make hospitals reduce treatments and increase patient mortality? To answer this question, I analyze the decisions of U.S. kidney transplant centers, where a 2007 reform threatened to decertify a center if the observed-expected (OE) death ratio of transplanted patients exceeds a given threshold. Using variation in distance to the OE threshold, I show that the reform reduced the probability of transplanting a patient-kidney pair. The reduction is more significant for riskier operations and low-volume centers. I find little change in aggregate patient mortality. My results suggest centers avoid transplants for performance gains, and the reform’s effect is mainly redistributive.

Do transplant centers change strategies after poor performance?

Medicare’s conditions of participation (CoP) is a policy that requires kidney transplant centers’ numbers of graft failure or patient death 1 year after transplant to fall below a cutoff. Centers that repeatedly exceed the cutoff are flagged for poor performance and risk losing Medicare funding or certification. I use a sharp regression discontinuity design to study centers’ response to being flagged for poor performance. Contrary to the existing literature, I find no evidence to suggest that flagged centers reduce (increase) the transplant of high (low) risk kidneys or waitlist younger, less obese or non-diabetic patients.

Publications:

Association of transplant center market concentration and local organ availability with deceased donor kidney utilization. Am J Transplant. 2022;22(6):1603-1613.

with Syed A. Husain, Kristen L. King, David C. Cron, Nikole A. Neidlinger, Sumit Mohan, Joel T. Adler