OHE is Pleased to Announce the Appointment of Two New Economists: Margherita Neri and Jimena Ferraro

Margherita Neri and Jimena Ferraro joined the OHE team in December 2016 and January 2017, respectively. We welcome them to the team.

Margherita Neri joined the OHE team in December 2016 following completion of her MSc in Economics at University College London. She also holds an undergraduate degree in Economics and Statistics from the University of Siena, Italy, which included a year spent as a visiting student at the University of Oxford.

Margherita’s research interests focus on the evaluation of healthcare policies, including incentives to optimise the demand and supply of health care as well as aspects of competition in healthcare and pharmaceutical markets.

As part of her MSc dissertation, she led an empirical study on the effect of a health care policy that introduced higher out-of-pocket prices for outpatient care services supplied by public health care facilities in Italy. Contrarily to theoretical expectations, this analysis found no evidence of a significantly negative demand response to more expensive services. Although public health does not seem particularly at risk as a consequence of this health care policy, the evidence is suggestive of the fact that access to public health care in Italy is increasingly based on the ability to pay rather than actual health needs of the population.

Jimena Ferraro joined OHE in January 2017. Prior to this Jimena worked as a consultant in Argentina, working across a variety of sectors ranging from regulation and competition policy to microfinance and export promotion.

Jimena’s current research interests include industrial organisation, competition policy, regulation, and health economics. She has carried out research to study different competitive environments and their effects on market structures, including cheating behaviours in auctions, and strategies to reduce piracy in online markets. She also conducted quantitative and qualitative research to analyse physicians’ (non-monetary) incentives to do cesarean section deliveries in Argentina.

Jimena holds a PhD in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics, where she specialised in Industrial Organisation. She spent the last year of her PhD as a visiting researcher at Imperial College Business School.