Sean Nicholson is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) at Cornell and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Nicholson teaches courses in the University's College of Human Ecology including one on the US health care system, health care finance and health care information technology.
Prior to joining the PAM Department in 2004, Nicholson was a faculty member in the Health Care Systems Department at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for four years as a management consultant with APM and taught high school for two years before enrolling in graduate school. Nicholson received a B.A. from Dartmouth in 1986 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Wisconsin-Madison in 1997.
Nicholson is currently conducting research in four areas: the value of new medical technologies; the benefits of physician specialization; the effect of financial incentives on physicians' treatment decisions; and the causes of autism. Specific research projects include estimating a quality-adjusted price index for colon, breast, and lung cancer drugs in the United States; determining why the US spends more on cancer treatment than Europe and whether the additional spending is worth it; examining whether physicians' cancer treatment decisions depend on the profits they make when administering chemotherapy; and analyzing whether group practices foster physician specialization and whether patients benefit from specialization.
*Updated July 17, 2013
