Benjamin Handel
is a 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 and a co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Insurance Working Group. His research focuses on health care economics, industrial organization and behavioral economics. Handel has worked with numerous businesses and policymakers in these areas and teaches PhD courses in health economics and industrial organization.
Handel received the 2018 ASHEcon Medal for top health economist under the age of 40. He received the Econometric Society’s Frisch Medal for his Econometrica article “Equilibria in Health Exchanges.” He received the NIHCM Foundation Research Award for best health economics research paper for his Quarterly Journal of Economics article on the impacts of consumer cost-sharing in health care. Handel is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and of a Sloan Research Fellowship. Handel was selected as a member of the Review of Economic Studies (ReStud) Tour in 2010.
Handel has worked on a wide range of topics including insurance market design, health care provider productivity, competition policy in the health care sector, regulation of the health care sector, the behavioral economics of consumer choices, dynamic product pricing, and the industrial organization of social media markets.