New Faculty: Kelly Yang

Kelly Kaili Yang is happy to join the BEPP faculty as an Assistant Professor.

Born and raised in Beijing, Yang received her undergrad degree from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong (BSc. in Mathematics and Economics). Following graduation, she came to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Duke University. As a teaching assistant, she taught MBA and master level courses at Fuqua School of Business and in the Economics Department at Duke. These courses were in health care markets, managerial economics, and applied econometrics.

Yang’s research fields include industrial organization, health economics and international trade. Her research has centered around technology adoption and how it affects many aspects of the economy and people’s lives.

“My dissertation focuses on healthcare providers’ adoption of new treatment technologies with dynamic scale economies, and studies the optimal adoption regulation by examining the trade-off between concentrating medical care in high quality providers and promoting patient choice and access to healthcare,” says Yang, who has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, Harvard Business Review, JAMA Network Open, and Health Affairs.

The paper in the Journal of Political Economy focuses on how technology adoption or quality upgrading is complementary among manufacturing firms through the production network.

Her other health policy papers focus on the consequences of recent private equity acquisition of US hospitals including impact of ownership structure changes on service offerings, adoption of profitable technologies, and patient outcomes for common medical and surgical conditions.

At IU, Yang will teach G-492 Predictive Analytics for Business Strategy for undergraduates in which students learn to use predictive analytics to measure the causal effects of business strategies and gain hands-on experience with both economic models and data analysis. She’ll also teach G-652 Econometric Methods in Business II for PhD students. This course introduces structural econometric models and the associated estimation methods that are central to empirical industrial organization and other quantitative research fields.

Yang was drawn to Indiana University because of the people.

“The main attractions for me are the opportunities to learn from and work with amazing colleagues and students at BEPP and IU!” says Yang, who is settling nicely into Bloomington with her husband, whom she met in high school.

“We came to the U.S. together, got married and both got our PhDs in Economics at Duke University,” says Yang.

In her free time, Yang loves to immerse herself in music. She grew up playing the accordion and piano. She also participated in school choir for many years. Now she is primarily an avid listener and especially likes classical and pop music.

“I have really enjoyed the music and theatre events and performances at IU!” says Yang.