Abby Alpert, PhD │ CHIBE X DDVP Research Seminar
May 07, 2026
| 12:00 pm ‐ 1:00 pm | HybridSpeaker(s)
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Abby Alpert, PhD — Associate Professor of Health Care Management, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Location
Event Description
Topic: “Managing Drug Use Through Administrative Burden: Evidence from Medicaid.”
Lunch will be served. While registration is not required, it is recommended. Please register here.
Virtual attendees can join here via Zoom: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/94211827212.
About the Talk: Means-tested programs that allocate benefits to low-income individuals often rely on administrative hurdles, rather than prices, to ration access. We study the impact of prior authorization, one of the most widely used non-price mechanisms for managing prescription drug use in Medicaid. We introduce a Regression-Discontinuity (RD) design leveraging age-based discontinuities in prior authorization restrictions to isolate its impact from other features of insurance design. Children below (or above) a certain age must obtain prior authorization for the same drugs that children on the other side of the age cutoff can fill without prior authorization. These age cutoffs vary across plans within a state, providing a unique source of identification. We find significant reductions in prescription drug use and spending for ADHD drugs. Using novel plan-level data on prior authorization approval criteria, which allows us to identify patients eligible for treatment, we show that these effects are primarily driven by the administrative hassles of the prior authorization process rather than by improved targeting of treatment.
About the Speaker: Abby Alpert is an Associate Professor of Health Care Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research interests are in health economics and public finance. Her work focuses on the economics of the pharmaceutical sector encompassing two main areas: 1) the impacts of government intervention in pharmaceutical markets and 2) the role of the pharmaceutical industry in the opioid epidemic. Her recent research explores how vertical integration has impacted the Medicare prescription drug insurance market, the consequences of direct-to-consumer advertising on prescription drug spending and utilization, and how Medicaid utilization management policies impact access to prescription drugs for vulnerable populations. Her work has also contributed to understanding the root causes of the opioid epidemic and the unintended consequences of supply-side policies aimed at reducing opioid abuse. Additionally, her recent research studies the impacts of opioid abuse on the labor market. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Economist.
The Deans’ Distinguished Visiting Professorship program recognizes and engages rising stars on the Penn faculty based in schools outside of PSOM. Building on the wealth of local expertise, our program highlights important research contributions with an eye toward fostering relationships between faculty.