Benjamin Vatter
I am the Class of 1943 Career Development Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Applied Economics group, as well as a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University in 2022.
My research centers on questions in industrial organization and public economics, with emphasis on competition and policy design in healthcare markets.
I will be visiting the Department of Economics at Harvard University during the 2026–2027 academic year.
Publications
Quality Disclosure and Regulation: Scoring Design in Medicare Advantage
Working Papers
(Revision requested at the Journal of Political Economy)
With Jose Ignacio Cuesta and Carlos Noton
Hospital-insurer integration leads to skewed plan generosity, harming hospital competition, increasing prices and premiums, and offsetting the gains from reduced double marginalization
With David Dranove and Sungjin Kim
Distant hospital mergers raise prices when employers overlap across markets, even with little patient substitution and across vast distances. Integrated systems appear to gain leverage over insurers competing for employer contracts.
