Edward Kong
MD PhD Student
I am a 7th-year MD-PhD student in the Harvard Department of Economics and Harvard Medical School. I study the economics of health care markets, with a focus on patient outcomes, innovation, and health care costs.
I am currently pursuing an MD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program and earned a PhD in Economics from Harvard, where my dissertation focused on the economics of pharmaceuticals and infectious disease. Prior to graduate school, I studied Economics and Biomedical Engineering at Yale and worked as a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Research Areas
My research aims to combine insights from clinical practice with tools from economics to address broad questions in health economics.
Health policy decisions and patient outcomes
My research in this area examines how policies, incentives, and physician behavior affect patient health outcomes. This includes work on the impact of physician incentives on medication adherence, the effect of COVID-19 shutdown policies on unemployment, and how stewardship programs affect antibiotic use, resistance, and mortality. Ongoing work with Yunan Ji studies the effect of hospice care on well-being at the end of life.
Costs, innovation, and access to care
This line of work focuses on how policy decisions shape the interaction between health care costs, innovation, and access. Topics include the effect of copayment coupons on drug prices and quantities (with Leemore Dafny and Kate Ho), hospital compliance with price transparency regulations, and how market incentives influence drug innovation (with Olivia Zhao). Ongoing work examines access to melanoma treatments (with Steven T. Chen) and specialty drug costs in dermatology (with Arash Mostaghimi).
Industrial organization of health care markets
I study how market structure, regulation, and policy design affect insurer and provider behavior. Ongoing work with Tim Layton and Mark Shepard shows how adverse selection in health insurance markets can lead to instability and insurer exit.
Selected Research Papers
Kong, E. and Olivia Zhao (Job Market Paper). “Market Incentives and the Drug Development Pipeline: Evidence from Antibiotics.” SSRN (link)
Dafny, L., Ho, K., & Kong, E. (2024). “How Do Copayment Coupons Affect Branded Drug Prices And Quantities Purchased?” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 16(3), 314-346.
Kong, E and Daniel Prinz. (2020). “Disentangling Policy Effects Using Proxy Data: Which Shutdown Policies Affected Unemployment During the COVID-19 Pandemic?” Journal of Public Economics, 189, 104257