Katja Hofmann

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Stanford. My primary field is industrial organization, with applications in health care and consumer finance. Before, I was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research . I obtained my BSc and MSc in Economics from the University of Mannheim in Germany.
My work is supported by the Stanford Impact Labs and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship .

Publications

Working papers

Work in progress

CV

Does medicine run in the family—evidence from three generations of physicians in Sweden: retrospective observational study

with Maria Polyakova, Petra Persson, and Anupam B Jena in BMJ (2020; 371)

Press coverage: NY Times, Inside Higher Ed, SIEPR, AAAS EurekaAlert, Lakartidningen

The Effect of Public Insurance Design on Pharmaceutical Prices: Evidence from Medicare Part D

with Zong Huang

Abstract: The Affordable Care Act of 2010 closed an intentional coverage gap in the Medicare Part D benefit. Before the closure, when beneficiaries entered the so-called donut hole, they became responsible for up to 100% of drug spending on the margin. The policy change greatly lowered cost-sharing for beneficiaries, in part by requiring drug manufacturers to cover 50% of all branded drug spending in the coverage gap. We study how beneficiaries responded to the insurance expansion and how drug prices evolved accordingly. In line with the motivation of the policy change, beneficiaries became 45% less likely to forgo prescriptions when entering the coverage gap. Drug manufacturers correspondingly increased prices: retail prices for branded drugs with greater exposure to the policy change differentially increased by 21%, driven by drugs without generic competition. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the gap closure intended a $100 per capita transfer to beneficiaries, financed by drug manufacturers. However, by raising prices, manufacturers were able to substantially shift the incidence such that the cost of the insurance expansion was primarily borne by the federal government.

Access to Abortion Care and Low-Income Women's Health: Evidence from Medicaid Beneficiaries

with Caitlin Myers, Maya Rossin-Slater, and Becky Staiger

Abstract: The 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health represents the most dramatic transformation of the landscape of abortion access in the United States in the last half-century, and there is a critical need to understand its potential implications for women's health. Although this decision is unprecedented in its reach across the nation, it reflects a culmination of many local and state-level restrictions on abortion access over the preceding decade. This paper uses variation in abortion facility operations from 2015 to 2019 to quantify the causal relationship between travel distance to the nearest abortion facility and physical and mental healthcare outcomes measured in administrative Medicaid claims data. We focus on young women aged 15--24 and use within-person variation in distance from one's residence ZIP code in an event-study design. We find that a one standard deviation increase in travel distance (about 24 miles) leads to a 0.15 percentage point increase in the likelihood of having a live birth four quarters later. This effect is driven by live births with delivery complications, and we additionally find increases in the incidence of pregnancy complications and emergency department visits, especially among Hispanic women. Our findings highlight the broad implications of reduced access to abortion care on young, low-income women's perinatal healthcare needs and on racial and ethnic health disparities.