Han Pham

PhD Candidate in Public Policy
Cornell University, Brooks School of Public Policy

I am a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Cornell University's Brooks School of Public Policy, with research topics in policy analysis and health economics.

My job market paper studies the location decision of physicians and discusses health workforce policies. My other papers study the use of electronic cigarettes in smoking cessation using purchase records and the teaching function of hospitals using accreditation data.

My most recent side project is using de-identified physician notes to guess patient length of stay, motivated by my interest in natural language processing and data collection.

My CV is available here.

Research

Job Market Paper

Can Funding Fix Rural Physician Shortages? Evidence from a Location Choice Model

Abstract: Physician geographic density affects access to care, especially in rural areas. This paper examines the location choice of early-career physicians, which includes standard demographics, practice environment proxies via Graduate Medical Education (GME) programs, and personal ties to the location. Using these demand parameters, I study the impacts of workforce policies by estimating the changes to rural probability when relevant attributes are varied in counterfactual analysis. I find that previous ties are major drivers of practice location: physicians have 49 times higher odds of choosing the location where they did their residency, but the effects are halved in rural areas. Higher local hourly wages have little to no effect. Rural residency training exposure works through fostering previous ties to the location, underscoring the importance of local attributes in policy investments, and the potential of initiatives besides traditional approaches.

ASHEcon 2025 Session

Selected Projects

Assessing New York's Healthcare Disparities Using Health Plan Quality Data (Forthcoming at The American Journal of Managed Care)

with Sean Nicholson and Joseph Stankaitis

E-cigarette Use and Smoking Cessation in Consumer Data (In Progress)

with Alan Mathios

Teaching Function and Quality of Care (In Progress)

Using Physician Notes to Predict Length of Stay: Evidence from ClinicalBERT (In Progress)

Teaching Experience

As a teaching assistant at Cornell University, I have supported courses in econometrics, health economics, and public policy analysis.

Fall 2025 — PUBPOL 5310: Applied Econometrics for Public Policy (Douglas Miller)
Spring 2025 — PUBPOL 4281 / PUBPOL 5281 / ECON 3711: The Economics and Regulations of Risky Health Behaviors (John Cawley)
Spring 2024 — PUBPOL 5673: Health Policy for Managers (Eric D. Hargan)
Spring 2023 — PAM 3870: Economic Evaluations in Health Care (Donald Kenkel)
Fall 2022 — PAM 2040: Economics of the Public Sector (Pauline Leung)
Spring 2022 — PAM 3301: Intermediate Policy Analysis (Sharon Tennyson)
Fall 2021 — PAM 2040: Economics of the Public Sector (Brandon Tripp)

Curriculum Vitae