Prof. Dr. Iris Kesternich

Health and Labor Economics

Iris Kesternich’s research focuses on incentives and the interaction of market participants in health and labor markets. She is specifically interested in the influence of non-monetary incentives and social preferences on decision-making in these domains. In a current sequence of projects she is analyzing the effects of the meaning of work on labor supply; the influence of professional norms on medical decision making; and the role of social preferences in situations with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.

Ms. Kesternich is also interested in the long-term consequences of adverse events such as experiences of hunger or war on health, preferences, and behavior. In her third core research area, she analyses both consumer preferences and provider behavior in health and long-term care markets. An example is her recent work on entry behavior of for-profit and long-profit firms in the German long-term care market.

Iris Kesternich is Professor of Behavioural Economics at KU Leuven and Nucleus Professor of Economics, in particular Empirical Health Economics, at the University of Hamburg. She received her PhD at LMU Munich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Monika Schnitzer. Iris Kesternich is an Associate Editor at the Journal for Economic Behavior and Organization. She is a member of the Health Economics Committee of the German Economic Association (VfS). She founded the Committee for International Cooperation within the German Society for Health Economics (dggö). Furthermore, she is a ZEW Research Associate and cooperates with the research group “Health Care Markets and Health Policy” at ZEW Mannheim.