Amanda Kowalski

Amanda Kowalski, the Gail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Department of Economics, is a health economist who specializes in bringing together experiments, models grounded in context-specific knowledge, and econometric techniques to answer questions that inform current debates in health policy.

Professor Kowalski’s recent research analyzes experiments and clinical trials with the goal of designing policies to target insurance expansions and medical treatments to individuals who will benefit from them most. Her previous research has explored impacts of health insurance through Medicaid expansions, the Affordable Care Act, the Massachusetts health reform of 2006, and employer-sponsored plans.  She has also examined impacts of health spending on at-risk newborns.

Professor Kowalski is the 2019 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal, given to “an early career economist who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics” by the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon). She has also been honored with a CAREER Award by the National Science Foundation, the Zellner Thesis Award in Econometrics and Statistics by the American Statistical Association, and the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research by Yale University. Her research has received the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project Outstanding Article of the Year Award, the Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for the Best Research in Health Econometrics, the Garfield Economic Impact Award, and the National Institute of Health Care Management Research Award. The National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute have supported her research, which has been published in top general interest journals in economics, including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Her research has also been featured in the popular press, including The New York Times, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.

Professor Kowalski has been elected to the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association and the Board of Directors of the American Society of Health Economists. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the Economics of Health, Public Economics, and Aging programs. She holds a PhD in economics from MIT and an AB in economics from Harvard. She was previously an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale Department of Economics. Before joining Yale, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in Health and Aging at the NBER. Her interest in health policy has led her to spend two years in Washington, DC, one as a research assistant in health and labor at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and another as the Okun Model Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and she spent the 2017-2018 academic year as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Princeton Department of Economics and as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Princeton Center for Health and Wellbeing.