People

Ernst R. Berndt is the Louis B. Seley Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Co-Director of the Biomedical Enterprise Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

He is also the Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Program on Technological Progress and Productivity Measurement. Until recently, he served as Chairperson of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, an interagency advisory panel established by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Professor Berndt earned a Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1972, and was awarded an honorary doctorate for his research on productivity measurement from Uppsala University in Sweden in 1991. He is an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society, and has served on the editorial boards of numerous economics and statistics peer-reviewing journals. In 1989 Professor Berndt was named as the most cited economist under age 40 in 1985, and in 2002 he was honored with the Excellence Award in Mental Health Policy and Economics Research by the International Center of Mental Health Policy and Economics. He recently completed a two-year term as a Panel Review Member of the National Science Foundation Program on Methodology, Measurement and Statistics, and an assignment on an Intermittent Detail to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Office of the Commissioner.

Much of Professor Berndt's recent research has focused on price, output and outcomes measurement in the health care industries, and on regulatory policies at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Over the past five years, Professor Berndt's research findings have been published in mainline medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychopharmacology Bulletin, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry), health care services and policy journals (Health Affairs, Value in Health, Medical Care, Psychiatric Services), health economics journals (Journal of Health Economics, Pharmacoeconomics), and mainline economics journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, Journal of Law and Economics, and Review of Industrial Organization). His most recent research has focused on assessing the impacts of the Prescription Drug User Fee Acts on FDA drug approval times and safety withdrawal rates (in press, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery) and on developing advance purchase commitments by foundations and governments to create incentives for R&D focused on third-world diseases such as malaria (May/June 2005 Health Affairs).