James Rebitzer

I am the Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. My research and teaching focus on organizational economics with a special emphasis on behavioral issues in the economics of human resource systems. Much of my recent research concerns organizational issues in the US healthcare system. I am currently writing a book on the nature and direction of innovation in the U.S. health sector.

At BU, I was founding chair of the Markets, Public Policy and Law Department from 2009 through 2018. I am also a professor of economics (by courtesy) in the College of Arts and Sciences Economics Department. I am also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

Prior to coming to BU in August 2009, I was the Mannix Professor of Health Care Finance and Economics and also the Chair of the Economics Department at Case’s Weatherhead School of Management. Before arriving at Case in 1998, I was an assistant and associate professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (1989-1997); and prior to that was an assistant professor in the Economics Department at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-1998).

I have published papers in many academic journals including The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Health Economics, The Journal of Labor Economics, Management Science, The Journal of Public Economics, The Rand Journal of Economics, The Journal of Economics, Behavior and Organizations, The Journal of Economic Perspectives and the Journal of Economic Literature. Articles about my research have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 2004, I won The Health Care Research Award: from the National Institute of Health Care Management for a paper (joint with Marty Gaynor and Lowell Taylor) “Physician Incentives in HMOs”In 2012, I won the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the best paper in health economics (joint with Randall Cebul, Lowell Taylor and Mark Votruba) for “Unhealthy Insurance Markets: Search Frictions and the Cost and Quality of Insurance”
To learn more about my personal history and my ideas about economics, see this interview in the Newsletter of the BU Economics Department. I discuss similar ideas in this brief talk at the ceremony where I was awarded the Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management.