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 theoretical models and econometric techniques to answer questions that inform current debates in health policy.

Professor Kowalski’s recent research advances methods to analyze experiments and clinical trials with the goal of designing policies to target insurance expansions and medical treatments to individuals who will benefit from them the most. Her previous research has explored the impact of Medicaid expansions, the Affordable Care Act, the Massachusetts health reform of 2006, and employer-sponsored health insurance plans. She has also used cutting-edge techniques to estimate the value of medical spending on at-risk newborns.

Professor Kowalski is the 2019 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal, given to “an economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics.” She has previously been honored with a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the Yale Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research. Her research has received the HCUP Outstanding Article of the Year Award, the Garfield Economic Impact Award, the National Institute of Health Care Management Research Award, and the Zellner Thesis Award. The National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute have supported her research, which has been published in peer-reviewed journals, 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 is a Research Associate at the NBER. She holds a PhD in economics from MIT and an AB in economics from Harvard. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale Department of Economics. Before joining Yale, she held a post-doctoral 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.