Leemore Dafny, PhD

Leemore Dafny is the Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2016, she served as Director of Health Enterprise Management and Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research examines competitive interactions among payers and providers of healthcare services, and the intersection of industry and public policy. Dafny’s work has been published in academic journals such as the American Economic Review and The New England Journal of Medicine, and featured in popular media such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Current projects include studies of consolidation in the U.S. hospital industry and the kidney dialysis industry, products and pricing on the public health insurance exchanges, copayment coupons for prescription drugs, and the implications of for-profit ownership of insurance companies.

Dafny graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company prior to earning her PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has won several teaching awards as well as Kellogg’s leading research prize, the Stanley Reiter Best Paper award. Dafny is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Editor of The International Journal of Health Economics and Management, and a Board Member of the American Society of Health Economists and the Health Care Cost Institute.

Dafny’s expertise spans both the public and private sectors. She currently serves on the Panel of Health Advisers for the Congressional Budget Office. In 2012–2013, she was Deputy Director for Healthcare and Antitrust in the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC. Dafny advises companies, government agencies, and nonprofits on a variety of issues including antitrust matters, strategic decisions, and public policy.