Liisa T. Laine, PhD

Liisa T. Laine, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow and an associate fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania. She is also 2019-2020 RCMAR Fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center. Before her current appointment, Laine held visiting positions at the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at University of Washington (2017-2018), the Economics Department at Columbia University (2015-2017) and the Economics Department at Boston University (2012-2015). She received her PhD in Economics from University of Jyväskylä, Finland in 2019.

Laine’s research interests are in applied microeconomics and industrial organization, with a particular focus on the functioning of health care markets, incentive design, and policy evaluation. In her research, Laine uses quasi-experimental methods for causal inference which she has used to study, for example, the effects of an implementation of an electronic prescribing system on the use of prescription drugs and the market-level and distributional effects of public school choice. In addition to empirical research using comprehensive administrative data sets, Laine also develops theoretical industrial organization models, which she has used in her research studying the effects of health care competition on prices and quality and the design of provider payments. Some of Laine’s more recent work focuses on examining the market structure for residential long-term care.