About

Hanming Fang is the Norman C. Grosman Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment at the Department of Health Care Management and the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School. He is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics, including topics such as discrimination, social insurance, welfare reform, health insurance markets, and population aging. His research has earned recognition such as the 17th Kenneth Arrow Prize by the International Health Economics Association in 2008 for his work on advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market. He was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2018. Currently, Professor Fang is working on issues related to insurance markets, particularly the interaction between health insurance reform and the labor market, as well as alternative health insurance reform proposals. He also studies the Chinese economy, focusing on political economy, population aging, and social security. His professional service includes roles as a co-editor for the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and the International Economic Review, along with editorial board memberships for numerous journals. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he served as acting director of the Chinese economy working group, and holds affiliations with the Population Studies Center, Population Aging Research Center, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, and other research centers. Professor Fang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and has held academic positions at Yale University and Duke University.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Socioeconomics
• Geography
• Economics
• Environmental health
• Development economics
• Demographic economics
• Virology
• Demography

Selected publications

• Data Neutrality, Data Supply, and Market Competition

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Maternity Leave Extensions and Gender Gaps: Evidence from an Online Job Platform

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• High-Speed Rail and China's Electric Vehicle Adoption Miracle

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

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• German Long-Term Health Insurance: Theory Meets Evidence

  Journal of Political Economy · 2025-01-13 · 3 citations

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• To go electric or to burn coal? A randomized field experiment of informational nudges

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2025-04-11 · 3 citations

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• Decoding China's Industrial Policies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Fear and Risk Perception: Understanding Physicians' Dynamic Responses to Malpractice Lawsuits

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper investigates how physicians adjust their clinical decision-making following medical malpractice lawsuits and how these responses are driven by mental rather than nancial costs, and do not align with rational expectations.We combine a comprehensive health insurance claim database from a Chinese city with the universe of malpractice lawsuits to study changes in physician behavior and patient outcomes.We find that physicians respond to lawsuits by practicing more conservatively, rejecting high-risk patients, reducing surgery rates, and increasing the use of diagnostic tests and traditional Chinese medicine.These changes are associated with worse patient outcomes, consistent with defensive medicine.The effects are not limited to the directly involved departments but spill over to other departments within the same hospital.In addition, the changes are short-lived, with physicians reverting to their pre-lawsuit treatment patterns in eight weeks.We provide evidence that such responses are likely driven by mental cost (including fear) and deviate from rational expectations.First, physicians in hospitals with more and less frequent lawsuits exhibit similar responses to a new lawsuit; moreover, they respond similarly to winning and losing cases.Second, physicians' reactions to a patient's death vary depending on the recency of a salient lawsuit.Lastly, physician responses are especially strong following criminal violence against physicians, which is emotionally and psychologically salient.

  PublisherDOI

• Decoding China's Industrial Policies

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-05-01 · 19 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We decode China's industrial policies from 2000 to 2022 by employing large language models (LLMs) to extract and analyze rich information from a comprehensive dataset of 3 million documents issued by central, provincial, and municipal governments.Through careful prompt engineering, multistage extraction and refinement, and rigorous verification, we use LLMs to classify the industrial policy documents and extract structured information on policy objectives, targeted industries, policy tones (supportive or regulatory/suppressive), policy tools, implementation mechanisms, and intergovernmental relationships, etc. Combining these newly constructed industrial policy data with micro-level firm data, we document four sets of facts about China's industrial policy that explore the following questions: What are the economic and political foundations of the targeted industries?What policy tools are deployed?How do policy tools vary across different levels of government and regions, as well as over the phases of an industry's development?What are the impacts of these policies on firm behavior, including entry, production, and productivity growth?We also explore the political economy of industrial policy, focusing on top-down transmission mechanisms, policy persistence, and policy diffusion across regions.Finally, we document spatial inefficiencies and industry-wide overcapacity as potential downsides of industrial policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Fear and Risk Perception: Understanding Physicians' Dynamic Responses to Malpractice Lawsuits

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Arc of the Chinese Economy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-10-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Recent grants

• The Effects of Life Settlement on the Primary Life Insurance Market: Theory and Evidence

  NSF · $300k · 2009–2015

• Research on the Economics of Discrimination: New Empirical Methods, Theory and Applications

  NSF · $271k · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Naoki Aizawa

  100 shared

• Julie Shi

  74 shared

• Xuejie Yi

  Stanford University

  69 shared

• Xiaoyan Lei

  69 shared

• Patrick Bayer

  41 shared

• R. S. McMillan

  39 shared

• Zenan Wu

  Peking University

  33 shared

• Hanwei Huang

  City University of Hong Kong

  32 shared

Labs

• VoxChinaPI

  Together with Professor Jian Wang (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen) and Professor Wei Xiong (Princeton University), I am a Co-Founder and an Executive Committee member of VoxChina

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Pennsylvania

  2000

Awards & honors

• 17th Kenneth Arrow Prize by the International Health Economi…
• Fellow of the Econometric Society (2018)