Kate Ho, who served as the John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy and the co-director of the university’s Center for Health and Wellbeing at the University, died on Dec. 8 from cancer. She was 53 years old.
Ho joined the Princeton faculty in 2018. She taught several courses at the University covering firm competition and game theoretic methods in industrial organization, including ECO 327: Firm Competition and Strategy: A Mathematical Approach, ECO 542/543: Industrial Organization & Public Policy II/III, and ECO 566: Health Economics II.
Ho also co-taught the well-loved ECO 581B: Industrial Organization Workshop with Nicholas Buchholz. She received the Economics Department’s Best Advisor Award from graduate students and the Rosen Prize for undergraduate teaching twice.
She graduated from Cambridge University in 1993 with a degree in Mathematics and earned her Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 2005. Ho also served as the Chief of Staff to the UK Minister of State for Health for four years.
From 2005 to 2013, Ho was a faculty member in Columbia University’s Economics Department, where she taught Industrial Organization Economics.
Ho’s research focused on health care, where she published several papers about drug pricing and insurance coverage plans. She received the Richard Stone Prize in Applied Econometrics in 2006 for her paper “The Welfare Effects of Restricted Hospital Choice in the US Medical Care Market,” the Arrow Award in 2010 from the International Health Economics Association for her paper “Insurer-Provider Networks in the Medical Care Market,” and the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society in 2020 for her paper “Insurer Competition in Health Care Markets.”
She made seminal contributions to the literature modeling competition in the healthcare sector, both between insurers and hospitals and between insurers, physician incentives, and drug pricing. When she passed, she was working on research about drug pricing through pharmacies and insurers.
Ho was also a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a co-editor of Econometrica, an editor of the RAND Journal of Economics, and was a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and the Journal of Economic Literature.
Ho was also invited to give guest lectures at conferences around the world, including the International Industrial Organization Conference and the American Society of Health Economists Conference.
An obituary written by the University Economics department wrote that “Her mentorship of students and junior faculty will have a lasting impact on the field, as will her contributions to the research community. She will be deeply missed.”
Ho was married and had two children. She is the third active professor at Princeton to die this semester, following David Bellos on Oct. 26 and Alison Isenberg on Oct. 23.
Devon Rudolph is an associate News editor and staff Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’ She is from northern Virginia and typically covers student life and USG.
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