Biography

Jennifer Kao is an assistant professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She co-teaches business strategy to MBA students. Her research interests are in the economics of innovation, firm strategy, and health care.

Her work seeks to understand the determinants of innovation within organizations. She is particularly interested in the role of information and regulation in shaping the development of new medical technologies. For example, a recent project explores how publicly available scientific information from genome mapping efforts shapes research productivity in the pharmaceutical industry. Other projects investigate how competition shapes innovative firms' strategic disclosure decisions and the impact of drug approval regulation on pharmaceutical firms' market entry strategies. 

Kao received her Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard, where she was a National Bureau of Economic Research Predoctoral Fellow in the Economics of Health and Aging and the International Network on the Value of Medical Research. She holds a B.S. in business administration from UC Berkeley and M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics.