Katherine Ho (née Slack; 1972 â 8 December 2025) was a British-American economist who was the John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University. Her research focused on the industrial organization of the medical care market.
Ho obtained a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) and Master of Arts (M.A.) in Mathematics from Cambridge University in June 1993. and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 2005.
Before starting her career in academia, Ho served as a Chief of Staff to the Minister of State for Health, for the UK Government Department of Health. She then worked at McKinsey & Company, Inc, for two years before beginning her graduate studies. She joined Columbia University's Department of Economics as an assistant professor in 2005 and was tenured in 2013. She moved to Princeton University in 2018.
At her death, Ho was a co-editor at Econometrica. She was previously an editor at the RAND Journal of Economics and a co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. From 2018 to 2024, she was co-director (with Janet Currie) of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing.
Ho died from cancer in New York on 8 December 2025, at the age of 53.
Ho was an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She gave the Fisher-Schultz Lecture of the Econometric Society in Copenhagen in 2021.
In 2006, Ho received the Richard Stone Prize in Applied Econometrics for her paper, "The Welfare Effects of Restricted Hospital Choice in the US Medical Care Market". Her paper âÂÂInsurer-Provider Networks in the Medical Care Marketâ received the Arrow Award for Best Health Economics Paper in 2010 from the International Health Economics Association (iHEA). In 2020, Kate Ho and Robin Lee won the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society for their paper "Insurer Competition in Health Care MarketsâÂÂ.