Maria Polyakova, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her work investigates questions surrounding the role of government in the design and financing of health insurance systems. She is interested in the public financing of health insurance markets, what characterizes efficient public or private health insurance contracts, how insurance affects labor markets in healthcare, as well as in how individuals make decisions about their health care and health insurance, whether innovative incentives within health insurance contracts could improve population health and how the structure of health insurance systems affects the inequality in health outcomes.
