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(New draft!)
Kidney transplant centers are critical to patient survival, yet there is limited oversight of their performance and decision-making. This study evaluates a policy that terminates centers if post-transplant mortality exceeds risk-adjusted thresholds. Using variation in policy exposure across centers and a difference-in-differences design, I find that the policy reduced post-transplant mortality by 25 percent, primarily due to delayed immunosuppressant initiation until follow-up revisits, mitigating early post-transplant complications. I find no evidence that the policy increased discriminatory practices in patient selection or transplant decisions. Furthermore, centers leverage the gap between policy announcement and implementation to refine testing protocols, reducing redundant diagnostic testing by 50 percent. These findings demonstrate that oversight can improve patient outcomes without compromising equity. The study also informs policymakers about the merits of phased implementation, allowing centers to optimize post-transplant care across recovery phases before full enforcement.
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