Natalia Serna
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Assistant Professor
Health Policy
I am an economist with interests in industrial organization (IO) and health economics. My research agenda studies the impact of government policies and insurance provision on access to care through hospital networks, health outcomes, and healthcare costs. Specifically, I have a body of work showing how insurers use their hospital networks to engage in risk selection and how fixed cost heterogeneity and strong competition between insurers are sufficient to achieve broad hospital coverage. Given the importance of hospital networks for access to healthcare, in another line of research I explore the impact of network breadth and insurance plan characteristics on individual mortality. My research contributes to the literature that examines the role of insurance and hospital market structure in patient health using both causal inference and structural estimation methods.
Focal Areas: Health, Regulation and Competition