Barbara Schone is a senior economist in the Center for Cost, Financing and Access Trends at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and a visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Her research focuses primarily on the economics of aging and the employment-related health insurance market.

She has worked in the area of long term care for approximately fifteen years, with specific interest in how families make care decisions. She was one of the first researchers to adopt game theoretic bargaining models of family caregiving decisions. She has also studied the role of family structure and the impact of divorce on caregiving decisions. Throughout her research she has used creative economic modeling and sophisticated econometric analyses to further our understanding of family decisions.

Schone's work related to health insurance has focused on the employment-based market in particular. She has investigated patterns of insurance access and take-up trends, the impact of state small group reforms on health insurance coverage and the factors that affect families' decisions regarding health insurance more generally.

In addition, she has completed research related to preventive care and the effects of marriage on healthy behaviors among the elderly. Recent research is investigating several aspects of the relationship between obesity, health insurance, employment and marriage.

Her work has been published in a variety of journals including Demography, Inquiry, the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Human Resources. In 1996, she received the New Investigator Award for Excellence in Research in Aging and Disability from the Gerontological Health Section of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Schone received her doctorate in economics at the University of Virginia, where she was an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellow.