Mental and brain health disorders have become a global driver of health care spending in recent years. In parallel, growing inequality has become a serious challenge for most societies. While each phenomenon is on its  own a major source of concern for decision makers and policymakers, their  interactions present challenges that cannot be left unaddressed. Still, much remains to be understood about the relationship between changing income distributions, brain health trajectories, and human capital accumulation. Maripier Isabelle’s research combines tools developed in economics, recent advances from research in psychiatry and the expertise developed within the healthcare system to study the causal links between these phenomena. Some of her projects seek to develop new approaches exploiting clinical and sociodemographic data to better understand the impact of the social and economic status of individuals at risk of developing major psychiatric disorders on their health trajectories and their healthcare consumption. In other work, she seeks to isolate the impact of changes to individuals’ absolute and relative income on their healthcare utilization, and on their socioeconomic mobility.

Maripier Isabelle’s work also investigates the impact of growing income and wealth inequalities on the organization and performance of health care systems, especially with regards to changes in the demand for and supply of, respectively, publicly and privately financed care.

Finally, her research contributes to improving our understanding of the impact that various financial incentive may have on physicians’ behaviour, on the volume and nature of the care they provide, and more generally, on their labour supply. She uses administrative data to study how such incentives can affect the allocation of resources within the healthcare system, and how they can affect patient care.