NBER Roybal Center for Behavior Change in Health
The NBER Roybal Center for Behavior Change in Health is one of thirteen centers authorized by Congress in 1993 and named for former House Select Committee on Aging Chair Edward R. Roybal. The Roybal Center program supports the translation and integration of behavioral and social research findings into interventions to improve the lives of older people and the capacity of institutions to adapt to societal aging.
Since its founding, the NBER Roybal Center has worked to translate basic research findings in the economics of aging into practical applications that improve health and well-being. In its first decade, the Center studied field, laboratory, and natural experiments to better understand a range of health and financial well-being topics. Now in its fifteenth year, the Center supports clinical trials that explore the relationship between health outcomes, human behavior, and health dynamics. The fundamental aim of the Center is to identify and test opportunities for behavior change, focusing on scalable interventions with potential to broadly improve population health as people age.
Investigators
Joseph J. Doyle is the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management and Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research ranges widely in the field of health economics, addressing both the delivery of health care services and the operation of health insurance markets.
David Laibson is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His research focuses on behavioral economics, household finance, macroeconomics, and biosocial science.
Marcella Alsan, who is both an economist and a physician, is a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial disparities in health care usage and health outcomes.
Katherine Baicker is Dean and Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on the effects of public and private health insurance coverage on the distribution and quality of health care services.
Christopher F. Chabris is a psychologist who codirects both the Behavioral and Decision Sciences Program and the Behavioral Insights Team at Geisinger, an integrated healthcare system in Pennsylvania. His research focuses on attention, intelligence, decision-making, and behavior genetics.
David C. Chan is an associate professor of medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine. His research draws on labor and organizational economics to study the use of information in health care and the implications for productivity.
Michelle N. Meyer is the Chief Bioethics Officer at Geisinger, and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Bioethics and Decision Sciences. In addition to conducting normative ethics scholarship and empirical legal research, she uses survey experiments and qualitative methods to investigate judgments and decision-making related to science, innovation, and health.
Jonathan S. Skinner is a James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Economics, Dartmouth College, and a professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. His research focuses on government transfer programs, health care technology, disparities in health care, and saving behavior. He has been an NBER affiliate since 1985.
Supported by the National Institute on Aging grant #P30AG034532
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CITATION: Health Services Research 55(4), July 2020, pp. 503–511
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