Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

Nicole Esparza

Scholar, The Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

Nicole Esparza received a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton in 2007. Her research interests include organizational dynamics, urban inequality, and economic sociology. Her dissertation used a multi-method approach to examine nonprofit organizations in twenty-six U.S. metropolitan areas. This research explored how interorganizational dynamics and social and political context affect the distribution of homeless services. As a scholar, she is interested in studying hospital patient dumping, a practice in which hospitals avoid high-cost patients by refusing to admit, transferring, and/or releasing patients in unstable conditions.