Katherine Baicker

About

Katherine Baicker serves as the 15th Provost of the University of Chicago and is the Emmett Dedmon Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. She is responsible for academic and research programs across the University and oversees its budget. Baicker is a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health care policy, with research focusing on the effectiveness of public and private health insurance, including the impact of reforms on the distribution and quality of care. Her large-scale research projects include the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized evaluation of Medicaid coverage. Her work has been published in prominent journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Health Affairs, JAMA, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Prior to her current role, she was the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Baicker is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a director of Eli Lilly, and a trustee of the Mayo Clinic. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served on various advisory panels, including the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers and the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Health Care Management. From 2005 to 2007, she was a Senate-confirmed member of the…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Psychiatry
• Social psychology
• Engineering
• Virology

Selected publications

• Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 · 5046 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

  2020 · 661 citations

  The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on…

  PublisherDOI

• A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19

  Nature · 2023 · 107 citations

  proposed 19 policy recommendations ('claims') detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supp…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Social and Behavioural Science to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 85 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Heterogeneous effects of Medicaid coverage on cardiovascular risk factors: secondary analysis of randomized controlled trial

  BMJ · 2024-09-23 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Objectives To investigate whether health insurance generated improvements in cardiovascular risk factors (blood pressure and hemoglobin A 1c (HbA 1c ) levels) for identifiable subpopulations, and using machine learning to identify characteristics of people predicted to benefit highly. Design Secondary analysis of randomized controlled trial. Setting Medicaid insurance coverage in 2008 for adults on low incomes (defined as lower than the federal-defined poverty line) in Oregon who were u…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03AG027821

  NIH · $125k · 2009

• Core C - Measurement and Methods in ADRD and Racial Disparities Research

  NIH · $78.7M · 1997–2029

• NIH Grant RC2AG036631

  NIH · $11.5M · 2012

Frequent coauthors

• Julia Adler‐Milstein

  University of California, San Francisco

  81 shared

• Lawton R. Burns

  California University of Pennsylvania

  81 shared

• Heidi Allen

  Stanford University

  81 shared

• James Joo

  University of Chicago

  81 shared

• Jin Kim

  College of Saint Rose

  81 shared

• Michelle M. Mello

  Stanford University

  81 shared

• Amitabh Chandra

  Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center

  79 shared

• Amy Finkelstein

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  78 shared

Labs

• Urban LabsPI

Awards & honors

• Elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine
• Elected Member of the National Academy of Social Insurance
• Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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• Don Courseyh-19
• Chad Broughtonh-10