Neale Mahoney

Neale Mahoney applies advanced microeconomic methods to evaluate financial and healthcare practices at the center of modern litigation.

Summary

Neale Mahoney is the Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the TG Wijaya Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the inaugural George P. Shultz Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Neale is an applied micro-economist whose research focuses on health economics and consumer finance. He recently testified in the FTC’s successful consumer protection case against Amazon, in which he assessed liability and damages; the case resulted in a $2.5 billion settlement. At Stanford, his work examines credit card markets, medical debt, and hospital billing practices. His research on credit cards has demonstrated the benefits of regulating hidden fees and shown that interest rate reductions are only weakly passed through to borrowers with low credit scores. His studies of medical debt and hospital litigation over unpaid medical bills have received widespread academic and media attention.

Before joining Stanford, Neale was Professor of Economics and David G. Booth Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he taught from 2013 to 2020 and was the David G. Booth Faculty Fellow. Earlier, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard. Neale is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an Affiliated Professor at J-PAL.

Neale has received many honors over his career, including the ASHEcon Medal in 2021, which is given to an economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics, and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2016.

In addition to his academic work, Neale regularly advises federal and state governments. Most recently, he was a Special Policy Advisor for Economic Policy in the White House National Economic Council. He is also Chair of California’s Independent Consumer Fuels Advisory Committee.