Jacob Wallace is an Assistant Professor of Public Health (Health Policy) at the Yale School of Public Health. His research is focused on the economics of health insurance markets with particular emphasis on the impact of managed care in public insurance programs. This area of research is growing in importance, as the government is increasingly contracting with managed care plans to deliver benefits in Medicaid and Medicare. Specifically, he conducts work in three areas. The first uses novel administrative claims data and random assignment in Medicaid managed care (MMC) markets to study a variety of questions related to the economics of MMC. Projects include examining how provider networks impact the quality and cost of care recipients receive, measuring how much outcomes vary across (randomly-assigned) managed care plans, and investigating how MMC competition is impacted by the presence of a public option. In other work, he studies how changes in health insurance coverage impact health and financial health. Finally, he is interested in provider performance and efficiency measurement, with a focus on identifying natural experiments that can be leveraged to provide insight into existing approaches to provider measurement and risk adjustment. He received his PhD from Harvard University.
