Prof. Heidi L. Williams

Factors that Affect Medical Innovation

Heidi Williams works on the causes and consequences of technological change in health care markets. Specifically, she studies economic and policy factors that affect medical innovation, and quantifies the impacts of “missing innovation” that could have been beneficial for human health and medicine. She is most well known for her work on the Human Genome Project. In her dissertation research, Ms. Williams showed that intellectual property held by the company Celera on human genome sequences had negative consequences for the development of scientific research and genetic tests based on those genes. In some other work, Ms. Williams and her co-authors show that pharmaceutical firms under-invest in research in early-stage cancer drugs because they take longer time to get to market, as compared to drugs for late-stage cancer.

While visiting CES, Ms. Williams will primarily work on some ongoing research projects analyzing how changes to permitting requirements – that is, changes to the procedural and substantive legal requirements that need to be met in order for physical infrastructure projects to be built – affect private investment in physical infrastructure projects. At the Hans-Möller-Seminar (LMU), she will discuss a joint presentation with Jeff Kling – the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Research Director – describing the ways in which research informs CBO’s work for the US Congress, with a focus on the example of changes in permitting requirements.

Heidi Williams is the Orvil E. Dryfoos Professor in Economics and Public Affairs at Dartmouth College. Prior to Dartmouth, Ms. Williams was the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her AB in Mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2003, her MSc in Development Economics from Oxford University in 2004, and her PhD in Economics from Harvard in 2010. Her teaching and research focus on understanding how policy changes affect innovation, productivity, and economic growth. Together with Ben Jones from Northwestern, she co-directs the NBER Innovation Policy working group. She is also currently lead editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and works part-time on contract as a research advisor with the US Congressional Budget Office.