Radhika Jain

I am a health and development economist working on health policy in lower-income countries, particularly India. My research focuses on health care markets and the role of the private sector, socioeconomic and gender inequality in health, and health policy design. 

Much of my work to date has focused on government health insurance for low income households in India, including strategic behavior by private hospitals that undermines insurance effectiveness, gender inequality in insurance utilization, and the effects of increasing patient awareness of insurance entitlements. My current work and interests include strategies to improve hospital compliance, encouraging female usage of health benefits, urbanization and health, and hospital markets.

My paper on private hospital behavior won the International Health Economics Association (IHEA) 2021 Adam Wagstaff Award for outstanding research on the economics of healthcare financing in lower income countries. My research has been supported by grants from Harvard University, the Weiss Family Fund, and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). It has been covered by media and policy outlets in India including the BBC, Financial Times, IGC-Ideas for India, ADB-Development Asia, IndiaSpend, Ideas of India podcast, and econimate, and has also been cited in national policy documents. You can listen to me discuss my research on here and watch a summary of one of my papers on econimate. 

I am an Assistant Professor of Health Economics at University College London (UCL), an affiliate of the UCL Centre for Global Health Economics, and an invited researcher at J-PAL South Asia. I completed a doctorate in Global Health and Economics at the Department of Global Health at Harvard University, a Master of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Stanford University, and a doctoral fellowship at the Center for Global Development. Previously, I worked on impact evaluations of health programs in India and on the implementation of HIV programs across several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. I spent my early years in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai...but most of my childhood was spent in Mussoorie, a hill-station in the Himalayan foothills.