Sean Nicholson
Assistant Professor
The Wharton School
3641 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6218
(bio appears below)
Courses
Financial Management of Health Institutions (MBA course)
Health Economics (Ph.D. course)
Health Care Information Technology (MBA course)
Bio
Sean Nicholson, Ph.D.
Sean Nicholson is an Assistant Professor in the Health Care Systems Department at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches MBA courses in health care finance and information technology, and a Ph.D. course in health economics.
Dr. Nicholson is currently conducting research in five areas: the pharmaceutical industry, the economics of the physician workforce, the functioning of health insurance markets, determinants of physician practice patterns, and measuring the costs associated with lost work time. Specific research projects include: examining the motivation for alliances between biotech and pharmaceutical firms and the determinants of deal values between biotech and pharmaceutical companies; identifying factors that affect pharmaceutical R&D productivity; measuring the impact of pharmaceutical mergers; measuring risk selection in health insurance markets; examining whether physicians' treatment decisions are influenced by how their peers treat patients, their patients' health outcomes, and where they trained; measuring physician rates of return to specialization over time and examining barriers to entering medical specialties; examining how medical students form income expectations, whether expectations are biased and efficient, and whether income prediction errors affect physician behavior.
Sean received an A.B. in economics from Dartmouth College in 1986 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1997 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to graduate school Sean worked for four years as a management consultant with APM, where he helped develop their hospital reengineering product. He taught high school math for two years and has also worked with the Advisory Board Company.