Ben Handel studies health economics, industrial organization, the economics of information and applied microeconomics. In addition to being assistant professor of economics at Berkeley, he serves as a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a consulting researcher for Microsoft Research and a junior fellow in Hebrew University's economics department. Handel received his PhD in economics at Northwestern University and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He has worked on research related to consumer choice in health-insurance markets, as well as issues of health insurance market design, with applications to the health insurance exchanges set up in the Affordable Care Act.