About
Henry Cust is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Health Policy and is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Global Health. Prior to LSE, he was a Research Scientist at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Health at University College London, having spent the previous six years completing a PhD and teaching health economics and econometrics to postgraduate students at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
His PhD is in Health Economics from the LSHTM, has an MSc in Economics and Development Economics from the University of Nottingham, and a BSc in Economics from the University of York. A paper from his doctoral thesis won first prize in the International Health Economics Association student paper competition.
Henry is an applied economist working on the economics of health in low- and middle-income countries. Specifically on how income and climate shocks shape HIV risk through coping strategies in households; how incentives and information drive antibiotic use by patients and providers; and what happens to global health services when the financing behind them is withdraw, including how they transition to more sustainable funding. He has particular expertise in designing instruments to measure sensitive behaviours that people rarely report accurately, and in primary data collection in low-resource settings. He led the econometric analysis of the POWER randomised controlled trial of health insurance for HIV prevention in Cameroon, and the first study of HIV service disruption following the PEPFAR and USAID funding withdrawal in Uganda and Zimbabwe, forthcoming in The Lancet Global Health.
He is currently extending this work to antimicrobial resistance, where he is interested in the behaviour of patients and prescribers, and to the health effects of climate change and climate adaptation. He welcomes collaboration on evaluations where the outcome of interest is difficult to observe or measure directly, including evaluations of digital health technologies.
Teaching
HP420 Health Economics
HP422 Health Care Economic Evaluation
HP434 Methods and Data for Health Science
External affiliations
Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Global Health, University College London.
Expertise
HIV Prevention, Antimicrobial Resistance, Health Financing, Health Insurance and Financial Protection, Climate and Health, Economic Shocks and Health Behaviour, Quasi-experimental Impact Evaluation, Randomised Controlled Trials, Measurement of Sensitive Behaviours, Survey Design and Primary Data Collection