Michael Richards is an empirical health economist specializing in healthcare markets, provider competition, integration and consolidation, implications of ownership structure, and healthcare workforce issues. Professor Richards has been retained as a testifying expert in a life sciences matter.
Professor Richards analyzes a range of healthcare providers and markets, including hospitals, physicians, ambulatory surgery centers, imaging and lab services, health insurance, and pharmaceuticals. His primary research addresses how government regulations, public policies, insurance markets, vertical integration, workforce issues, and provider consolidation affect competition, prices, healthcare treatment choices, resource utilization, patient outcomes, and access to care. Professor Richards also studies the relationship between provider behavior and ownership structure, notably financial ownership structures such as private equity.
A prolific author, Professor Richards publishes on various healthcare economics topics, including outside financing in healthcare, cross consolidation, and labor markets. His research on these and other subjects has been featured in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the Journal of Health Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Journal of Public Economics. Several of his Health Affairs articles have been cited, variously, as “Editor’s Pick,” “Most Shared,” and “Most Read” in their respective publication years.
At Cornell, Professor Richards directs the Sloan Program in Health Administration and holds a secondary appointment at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Division of Health Policy & Economics. He teaches courses on healthcare organizations and the economics of healthcare markets. Professor Richards is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a trained medical doctor.
Previously, Professor Richards served on the faculty at Baylor University and the Baylor College of Medicine, where he taught health policy and health economics. Prior to his time at Baylor, he taught health economics at Vanderbilt University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.