Rising Star Paper Prize
This award, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is for best paper by a graduate student presented in a Rising Star sessions and is presented at the annual International Industrial Organization Conference.
2024 Recipient
Anran Li (Northwestern University), for "Commitment, Competition, and Preventive Care Provision"
Anran Li's paper examines the impact of competition and limited consumer commitment on the coverage of preventative health care by health insurance plans. The paper identifies an important trade-off that stems from competition; competition reduces insurance premiums but also reduces the incentives of insurers to invest in the long-term health of consumers since consumers can move to a different plan in the future. Li develops a dynamic equilibrium model in which insurers choose premiums and preventative care coverage and these choices impact the evolution of consumer health status. The paper demonstrates efficiency losses from fragmented insurance markets due to the loss of investment in preventative care. Li estimates the model using the Utah All Payer Claims Data and explores policy counterfactuals. Her model and estimates imply that the most promising method for addressing under-investment in preventative care is not eliminating competition but, rather, direct quality regulation. The committee believes that the model, methods, and estimates from the paper have wide-ranging implications for health insurance policy as well as other settings in which competition may dull long-run investment incentives. The paper is also timely as it contributes to current policy debates about insurance coverage for expensive drugs that have been found to have dramatic long-run health effects.
Past Recipients
2023
Pierre Bodéré (New York University), for “Dynamic Spatial Competition in Early Education: an Equilibrium Analysis of the Preschool Market in Pennsylvania”
2022
Kwok Hao Lee (Princeton University) and Leon Musolff (Princeton University), for “Entry into Two-Sided Markets Shaped by Platform-Guided Search”
2021
Joao Vitor Granja de Almeida (University of Pennsylvania), for “Regulation and Service Provision in Dynamic Oligopoly: Evidence from Mobile Telecommunications”
2020
Claudia Allende (Columbia University), for “Competition Under Social Interactions and the Design of Education Policies
2019
Cailin Slattery (University of Virginia), for “Bidding for Firms: Subsidy Competition in the U.S.”
2018
Mons Chan, (University of Minnesota), for “How Substitutable are Labor and Intermediates?”
2017
Christoph Walsh (Boston University), for “Liberalizing the Airwaves in Ghana: A Dynamic Structural Model of Radio Station Competition”
2016
Elena Prager (University of Pennsylvania), for “Tiered Hospital Networks, Health Care Demand, and Prices”
2015
Andrew Butters (Northwestern University), for “Demand Volatility, Adjustment Costs, Temporal Aggregation, and Productivity”
2014
Yair Taylor (Duke University), for “Patent Breadth versus Length: An Examination of the Pharmaceutical Industry”
2013
Garrett Johnson (University of Rochester), for “The Impact of Privacy Policy on the Auction Market for Online Display Advertising”
2012
The first Best Rising Star Paper prize was awarded to Lai Jiang (New York University), for “The Welfare Effects of Bill Shock Regulation in Mobile Telecommunication Markets”