By Anne M. Burton
Catherine Ishitani, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Tobin Center at Yale University (soon-to-be Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University in 2026), is the 2025 recipient of the ASHEcon Student Paper Award. The Student Paper Award is conferred annually to a current or just-graduated Ph.D. student whose sole-authored paper made the greatest contribution to health economics. I spoke with Catherine about her paper, her approach to research, and what is next for her professionally.
Anne: Congratulations on receiving the ASHEcon student paper award for your paper, “In Defense of the Middleman: Quality Failures in the Generic Pharmaceutical Market”! Tell me about the paper and how you came up with this idea.
Catherine: I was recommended a book called Bottle of Lies, written by Katherine Eban. The book describes top-to-bottom fraud and quality failures at a major generics manufacturer—corrupt inspectors, faked application data, the works. It took over my life a little—I stayed up until 3am reading it and then became fixated on finding data to verify the stories. That data was really the genesis for the paper, which tries to understand how quality is disciplined in the generics market. On another level, I was also excited to study generics because I knew so little about them, even though as a young person, they’re the part of the healthcare system I interact with the most.
Anne: I saw you present this paper at a conference a few months ago and I have to say you did an amazing job. How many times have you practiced or presented this paper? What advice do you have for graduate students about acing a conference, seminar, or job market presentation?
Catherine: Thank you so much! At this point, I have probably practiced this talk a hundred times, and my family is very sick of it. I’m a nervous speaker, so I’m a big believer in preparation. For me, that means iteratively writing down and practicing what I’m going to say, finding a clearer way of saying it, and then repeating the process. For my job talks, I would even listen to recordings of myself to identify the most awkward parts, which I used to do as a coxswain in college.
I received really helpful feedback about clarity from non-health economists, so I would advise graduate students to explain their research to people outside their field of expertise. Health papers can carry a lot of institutional details, and this helped me figure out the minimum facts the audience required and how to build my results into a story.
Anne: One thing I find really interesting about your research is that you combine methods and approaches from a lot of different fields of economics. To take this paper as an example, you start with some real-world data and present stylized facts, then move on to event studies to show the effects of recalls on drug purchases by intermediaries, next you develop an auction model that allows you to estimate essentially a price elasticity of demand for drug quality, and then you do some structural work to estimate welfare under counterfactuals. The first step is something I often see in macro seminars, then you move into classic applied micro, followed by some applied theory and IO. That’s a lot! But it really enables you to answer this question in a very satisfying way. What motivated you to weave all these different methods and insights from different fields together? Can you talk a little bit about the process—what did you start with, and what came last?
Catherine: From the start, I was inspired by some of my favorite papers that combine applied micro and IO techniques. Since I felt like I knew very little about generics, I wanted to begin with some basic facts. Those facts about quality suggested some questions about the effects of quality, which were cleanest to answer with applied micro techniques.
I also knew I wanted to model generic scoring auctions, but probably underestimated how tricky it would be to estimate them with limited price data. So in parallel, I was figuring out how to identify the model parameters. The auction model turned out to be a nice way to answer questions the micro techniques couldn’t, such as whether the effects were driven by the supply or demand side. And as a last step, it also allowed me to run counterfactuals inspired by real policy discussions.
Anne: You just started a postdoc at Yale in the Tobin Center for Economic Policy and then next year you will be joining Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Mailman School of Public Health. What are you most looking forward to about your postdoc and your upcoming AP position?
Catherine: So far, my favorite part of Yale has been getting lunch with the other health and IO economists. Next year, I’ll be joining Columbia HPM with two other new hires, and I am really looking forward to figuring things out with them. I’m also excited to get to talk health all the time with my new colleagues!
Anne: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Catherine: Thank you for all your questions. I’m honored to be here!
Citation:
Ishitani, Catherine. 2025. “In Defense of the Middleman: Quality Failures in the Generic Pharmaceutical Market” working paper. Accessed at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1p361xd2ja0v9zk5qx9wi/Ishitani_jmp_public.pdf?rlkey=zeayynv9w72ak3ycywez6rypf&st=xox48idx&dl=0 (September 15, 2025).