About me

I am Nucleus Professor for Economics, in particular Empirical Health Economics, at the Department of Economics at the Universität Hamburg and Professor for Behavioral Economics at the Department of Economics at the University of Leuven. My research focuses on incentives and the interaction of the market participants in health and labor markets. I am specifically interested in the influence of non-monetary incentives and social preferences on decision-making in these domains. In a current sequence of projects I analyze the effects of the meaning of work on labor supply; the influence of professional norms on medical decision making; and the role of social preferences in situations with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.  Another strand of research focuses on the long-term consequences of experiencing adverse events, such as periods of hunger or war, on health and labor market outcomes, and also on individual preferences and consumption behavior. In a third strand of research, I analyze both the demand and supply side in health care markets: decisions of consumers in a newly established market for description drugs, the pricing of insurance companies in an oligopolistic setting, and the interaction of profit- and non-profit firms in the long-term care market.

I obtained a Ph.D. in economics in 2010 from the University of Munich, and I had a position there as a postdoctoral researcher until September 2014. Over the last few years, I was a visiting scholar at a number of institutions such as Boston University, the Harvard Health Care Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, the Harvard Center of Population and Development Studies, the RAND Corporation and the University of York. Currently, I am Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, a member of the board of the German Society for Health Economics (dggö), a resident visitor at the RAND Corporation, and Research Associate at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim (ZEW); I am affiliated to the Behavioral Experiments in Health Network as well as to the Centre for Health Research at the Management School at Queen’s University, Belfast. Recently, I received an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project MORETHANMONEY - Nonwage attributes, gender, and the future of work.

Contact

Universität Hamburg
Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften
Professur für VWL, insb. Empirische Gesundheitsökonomie
Esplanade 36
20354 Hamburg 

E-Mail: iris.kesternich@uni-hamburg.de