Associate Professor and Director, MS-HSRP&A Program
Health Policy & Management
School of Public Health, University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN
(612) 626-4683
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Robert J. Town, PhD is the James A. Hamilton Professor of Health Economics and Associate Professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses upon health economics, industrial organization and applied econometrics. His work focuses on intersection of government policy and provider and insurer competition in the health care marketplace. Dr. Town has studied the role of network formation in hospital competition, the role of competition in determining hospital quality, the policy impact of the Medicare HMOs, the measurement of hospital quality, healthcare market dynamics and the appropriate competition policy in health care and health insurance markets. He has advised several state and federal antitrust authorities on healthcare competition issues. He is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota, he was an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California--Irvine and a staff economist in the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.