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 and science, firm strategy and health care.

Her work seeks to understand how information and regulation shape firms’ incentives to innovate. For example, a recent project explores how publicly available scientific information shapes the rate, direction and profitability of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Other projects examine how drug approval regulation shapes 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.