Ricardo B. Ang III

Ricardo “JR” Ang, a postdoctoral scholar in health economics and policy at The Murphy Institute's Center for Public Policy Research, is an applied microeconomist with research interests in health and urban economics. He studies how hospital constraints, public policies, and technological change shape healthcare delivery, physician workforce capacity, and patient outcomes. His current work is focused on how hospital capacity constraints contribute to treatment delays and how those delays in turn affect length of stay, complication rates, and discharge outcomes, drawing on nationwide hospital data and plausibly exogenous variation in operations. He received a PhD in Economics from Georgia State University, and joined Tulane University's Department of Economics and The Murphy Institute as a postdoctoral scholar in Fall 2024.

Another strand of Ang's research explores the Medicaid expansion’s role in addressing physician shortages, showing that the policy increased graduate medical education (GME) funding, which in turn expanded residency training capacity, particularly in high-demand specialties and among large, nonprofit, and urban hospitals. Across these projects, Dr. Ang uses large administrative datasets and causal inference methods to understand how both policy interventions and institutional constraints affect the delivery of care and the health of populations. His research has been presented at national public policy and economics conferences, including those organized by the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM), and the Southern Economic Association (SEA).