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:

Federal Oversight and Strategic Choices of Kidney Transplant Centers (New draft!)

Kidney transplant centers significantly influence patient survival, yet regulatory oversight of their performance and practices remains limited. This study evaluates a policy designed to terminate centers whose post-transplant mortality exceeds risk-adjusted thresholds. Using variation in policy exposure across centers and novel follow-up data, I employ a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the policy’s impact on patient outcomes and center behaviors. The policy reduced post-transplant mortality by 20 - 25%, though the mechanisms driving the improvements evolved over time. Initially, centers responded by performing fewer transplants after the policy announcement, thereby avoiding high-risk kidney matches. Over time, transplant volume recovered as centers adapted, increasing immunosuppressant prescriptions to prevent kidney rejection and enhancing viral testing protocols to manage associated side effects. These findings suggest that centers initially reduced transplants due to unfamiliarity regarding policy nuances but subsequently shifted toward actively improving post-transplant care.

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