Zack Cooper

In his academic work, he has examined the effects of hospital and physician mergers on providers’ prices and clinical quality, out-of-network billing for physician services, and the causes and consequences of rising healthcare spending in the US. Professor Cooper has testified in US court on the pricing of healthcare services and has advised clients in matters including mergers of firms in the healthcare sector.

Professor Cooper’s work has been published in leading academic journals including The Quarterly Journal of Economics and The New England Journal of Medicine. His work on surprise medical bills is widely credited with being a key driver of the No Surprises Act, a federal law passed in 2021 that protects consumers from unexpected medical bills. Professor Cooper’s research has been cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Boston Globe, and the LA Times and he has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR. Professor Cooper has presented his research at the White House, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services. He has also testified before the US Senate and before various state legislatures.

Professor Cooper is a faculty member at Yale University with appointments at the Yale School of Public Health and Department of Economics. He serves as the Director of Health Policy at Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and his PhD from the London School of Economics. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, has twice won the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation Research Award, and is a 2019 winner of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.