Jennifer Kao, PhD, is a faculty associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an assistant professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research interests are in the economics of health care, innovation and science, and firm strategy.
Her work seeks to understand how information and regulation shape firms’ incentives to innovate. For example, a recent project explores how publicly available scientific information shapes the rate, direction, and profitability of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Another recent project examines how competition shapes pharmaceutical firms’ information disclosure incentives.
Kao received her PhD in public policy from Harvard, where she was a National Bureau of Economic Research Predoctoral Fellow in the Economics of Health and Aging and the International Network on the Value of Medical Research. She holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from UC Berkeley and master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics.