The Gilbert Center

The Gilbert Center at the University of California at Berkeley fosters research related to the economics of industrial organization and health care markets. As health care spending increases and competition policy becomes more complex, it is crucial to develop economic tools and produce economic evidence to shed light on the key problems society faces in these areas. The Gilbert Center supports both policy-oriented and methodological research by hosting conferences and seminars, supporting researchers with grants and partnering with businesses and policymakers to generate research opportunities. In addition to supporting the generation of and discussion of research in the academic community, a key goal of the center is to effectively translate and disseminate research to the business and policy communities. The center was established in 2017 with an endowment from Rich and Sandra Gilbert.

Leadership

Benjamin Handel

Ben Handel is an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2010. He received his A.B. from Princeton and his Ph.D. from Northwestern. Handel is a co-director of the Gilbert Center for industrial organization research at Berkeley, a co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Insurance Working Group and a co-director of the UC Berkeley Opportunity Lab. He is an expert on health care economics and industrial organization and has worked with numerous businesses and policymakers in this area. You can click the following link to view Ben's site.

Jonathan Kolstad

Professor Kolstad is an Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business, where he holds the Henry J. Kaiser Chair, and in the Economics Department at UC Berkeley. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests lie at the intersection of health economics, industrial organization and public economics. He is interested in finding new models and unique data that can account for the complexity of policy relevant markets, health care in particular. Much of his work applies tools from behavioral economics and data science to better understand behavior and market outcomes and to design policy and technology interventions to improve welfare. You can click the following link to view Jon's site.

Post Doctoral Researchers

Yizhou Jin

I am an economist trained in empirical industrial organization. I study how data and AI technologies generate useful information in imperfect markets, and the mechanisms through which they create and distribute economic value. My research combines economic theory, causal inference, and modern computation methods to extract insights from large datasets. Currently, I focus on empirical applications in insurance and digital platforms based on independent collaborations with firms. My name is pronounced as "ee-joe jin." You can click the following link to view Yizhou's site.

Savannah Bergquist

My current research focuses on developing methods to produce evidence for policymaking in settings where data are systematically missing. As a postdoctoral scholar at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, I work on interdisciplinary projects spanning health economics, sociology, and data science. In my PhD dissertation I examined how data can be leveraged to achieve efficiency and fairness goals in individual health insurance markets, and I studied using health insurance claims data to identify cancer stage. My name is pronounced ‘suh-VA-nuh’ (rhymes with the American pronunciation of ‘banana’) ‘BUR-kwist’. You can click the following link to view Savannah's site.