Amy Finkelstein

Last updated
Amy Finkelstein
Born (1973-11-02) November 2, 1973 (age 50)
New York City, U.S.
Education Harvard University (BA)
University of Oxford (MPhil)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Spouse Benjamin Olken
Academic career
Field Public finance, health economics
Institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral
advisor		 James M. Poterba
Jonathan Gruber
Doctoral
students		 Heidi Williams [1]
Manasi Deshpande
Awards John Bates Clark Medal, 2012
Elaine Bennett Research Prize, 2008
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Amy Nadya Finkelstein (born November 2, 1973) is an American economist who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. [2]

Contents

She was awarded the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal for her contributions to economics. [3] [4] [5] She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences [6] and won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship [7] in 2018.

Education

Finkelstein studied government at Harvard University, where she was a Truman Scholar and received an BA, summa cum laude , in 1995. At Harvard, her interest in economics was inspired in part by taking economist Lawrence Katz's course "Social Problems in the American Economy". [8] She was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where she received an M.Phil. in economics in 1997. She received her PhD in economics from MIT in 2001 under supervision of James M. Poterba and Jonathan Gruber. [9]

Career

Finkelstein was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows for three years, after which she joined the MIT faculty in 2005 [10] and received tenure within three years. [8]

In 2016, MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences named Finkelstein the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor for a five-year term. [11] The professorship was established with a gift by Edmund MacDonald, and recognizes Finkelstein's outstanding achievements in the field of economics. [11]

Research

Finkelstein's primary expertise is in public finance and health economics, focusing particularly on health insurance. [8] She conducts research into market failures and government intervention in insurance markets, and the impact of public policy on health care and health insurance. [12] Together with Katherine Baicker, she is one of two principal investigators of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized evaluation of the impact of expanding Medicaid to low-income adults. [13] Her research has shown that newly enrolled Medicaid patients make more trips overall to providers after acquiring insurance, make more visits to emergency rooms, and benefit financially from having insurance, among other findings. [14] Finkelstein said that the body of research, including her work on the effects of the 2008 Medicaid expansion in Oregon, have made her confident that health insurance improves health. [15]

Awards

In 2008, Finkelstein was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), for her contributions to the economics profession. [16] In 2012, she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. The award cited her research as "a model of how theory and empirics can be combined in creative ways". [4] In 2018, Finkelstein received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. [17]

Personal life

Finkelstein is Jewish. She was born in New York City in 1973 to biologist parents, who both earned doctorates at The Rockefeller University. In 1940, her mother immigrated to the United States from Poland, where her maternal grandmother had received a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Warsaw. [18]

Finkelstein is married to MIT economist Benjamin Olken. [8]

Select publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medicaid</span> United States social health care program for families and individuals with limited resources

In the United States, Medicaid is a government program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources. The program is partially funded and primarily managed by state governments, which also have wide latitude in determining eligibility and benefits, but the federal government sets baseline standards for state Medicaid programs and provides a significant portion of their funding.

The RAND Health Insurance Experiment was an experimental study from 1974 to 1982 of health care costs, utilization and outcomes in the United States, which assigned people randomly to different kinds of plans and followed their behavior. Because it was a randomized controlled trial, it provided stronger evidence than the more common observational studies and concluded that cost sharing reduced "inappropriate or unnecessary" medical care (overutilization) but also reduced "appropriate or needed" medical care.

The MIT Department of Economics is a department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An out-of-pocket expense, or out-of-pocket cost (OOP), is the direct payment of money that may or may not be later reimbursed from a third-party source. For example, when operating a vehicle, gasoline, parking fees and tolls are considered out-of-pocket expenses for a trip. Car insurance, oil changes, and interest are not, since the outlay of cash covers expenses accrued over a longer period of time. The services rendered and other in-kind expenses are not considered out-of-pocket expenses; the same goes for depreciation of capital goods or depletion.

James Michael "Jim" Poterba, FBA is an American economist who is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and current National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) president and chief executive officer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esther Duflo</span> French-American economist (born 1972)

Esther Duflo, FBA is a French-American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emmanuel Saez</span> American-French Economist

Emmanuel Saez is a French-American economist who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His work, done with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, includes tracking the incomes of the poor, middle class and rich around the world. Their work shows that top earners in the United States have taken an increasingly larger share of overall income over the last three decades, with almost as much inequality as before the Great Depression. He recommends much higher marginal tax rates, of up to 70% or 90%. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2009, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2010, and an honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.

Katherine Baicker is an American health economist best known for the Oregon Medicaid health experiment. She serves as the provost of the University of Chicago.

Joseph P. Newhouse is an American economist and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, as well as the Director of the Division of Health Policy Research and of the Interfaculty Initiative on Health Policy. At Harvard, he is a member of the four faculties at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Harvard Medical School in Boston, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.

Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist and the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing. She is the 2024 President of the American Economic Association. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014–2018. She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006–2009. Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015. She was recognized for her mentorship of younger economists with the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economics Association in 2015 and also participated in the founding and evaluation of the AEA’s mentoring program for junior faculty.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oregon Medicaid health experiment</span>

The Oregon health insurance experiment was a research study looking at the effects of the 2008 Medicaid expansion in the U.S. state of Oregon, which occurred based on lottery drawings from a waiting list and thus offered an opportunity to conduct a randomized experiment by comparing a control group of lottery losers to a treatment group of winners, who were eligible to apply for enrollment in the Medicaid expansion program after previously being uninsured.

Heidi Williams is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and Director of Science Policy at the Institute for Progress. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and earned her MSc in development economics from Oxford University and her PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Prior to Dartmouth, Williams was the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emi Nakamura</span> American economist (born 1980)

Emi Nakamura is a Canadian-American economist. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Nakamura is a research associate and co-director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review.

The Grossman model of health demand is a model for studying the demand for health and medical care outlined by Michael Grossman in a monograph in 1972 entitled: The demand for health: A theoretical and empirical investigation. The model based demand for medical care on the interaction between a demand function for health and a production function for health. Andrew Jones, Nigel Rice, and Paul Contoyannis call the model the "founding father of demand for health models".

Kathleen M. McGarry is the Thomas Muench Endowed Chair of Economics at Stony Brook University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is also a co-investigator of the Health and Retirement Survey. She has also been a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2007 to 2009, she was Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt ‘72 Professor in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. She has served on the Editorial Boards of the American Economic Journal: Public Policy, the American Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Pension Economics.

Yuting Zhang is a professor of health economics at the University of Melbourne, and an expert on economic evaluations of health policy and healthcare reforms. She is a journal editor, award recipient, and has written numerous articles in influential journals in her field.

Amanda Kowalski is an American health economist serving as the Gail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Michigan. She is an elected member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association, and a research associate at the health, public economics, and aging programs of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kowalski's research focuses on health policy, in particular on the targeting of treatments and health insurance expansions to those that need them most. She is the winner of the 2019 ASHEcon medal, awarded by the American Society of Health Economists to the best researcher under the age of 40.

Sarah Miller is an American health economist currently serving as associate professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Her research examines the short and long-term effects of health insurance expansions, and the impacts of income on individuals' health and well-being. In 2022, she received the ASHEcon medal, awarded by the American Society of Health Economists to the best health economist under the age of 40.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Gennetian</span> American economist

Lisa A. Gennetian is an American applied economist focused on behavioral economics, child development, specifically child poverty, parent engagement and decision making, and policy and social investment considerations. She is the Pritzker Professor of Early Learning Policy Studies at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. Gennetian is associated with the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy, Duke University's Population Research Institute (DuPRI), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Children's Program. She has served on the editorial board of the Child Development journal.

References

  1. ↑ "Williams's CV". Archived from the original on 2019-02-20. Retrieved 2016-09-25.
  2. ↑ "Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) North America" . Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  3. ↑ "MIT economics professor awarded Bates Clark medal". The Boston Globe. 28 April 2012. Archived from the original on July 11, 2012. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
  4. 1 2 "MIT Economist of Health Care Wins John Bates Clark Medal – The Ticker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education". chronicle.com. 27 April 2012. Retrieved 2018-04-04.
  5. ↑ Levin, Jonathan; Poterba, James (2012). "Amy Finkelstein: 2012 John Bates Clark Medalist". Journal of Economic Perspectives. 26 (4): 171–184. doi:10.1257/jep.26.4.171. hdl: 1721.1/82879 . ISSN   0895-3309.
  6. ↑ "Amy Finkelstein". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2020-02-22.
  7. ↑ Meet the Academics Who Nabbed This Year’s MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants, Julian Wyllie, The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 4, 2018.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Dizikes, Peter (April 15, 2020). "A healthy understanding". MIT Technology Review . Retrieved 23 April 2020.
  9. ↑ Finkelstein, Amy (2001), Adverse selection and government intervention in life and health insurance markets . Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  10. ↑ "Amy Finkelstein – Short Biography". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on 27 March 2013. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
  11. 1 2 "Nine SHASS faculty members awarded named professorships". MIT News. 10 November 2016. Retrieved 2016-11-10.
  12. ↑ "First Study of Its Kind Shows Benefits of Providing Medical Insurance to Poor". The New York Times . 7 July 2011. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
  13. ↑ "National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): Oregon Health Insurance Experiment" . Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  14. ↑ "Testing their patients". MIT News. May 2017. Retrieved 2017-05-01.
  15. ↑ "Will repealing Obamacare really kill 60,000 people?". Washington Post. Retrieved 2017-03-22.
  16. ↑ "CSWEP Awards and Prizes". Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. Archived from the original on 2012-03-15. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
  17. ↑ "Amy Finkelstein".
  18. ↑ Viegas, Jennifer (2020). "Profile of Amy N. Finkelstein". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117 (32). PNAS: 18909–18911. Bibcode:2020PNAS..11718909V. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2014396117 . PMC   7430994 . PMID   32747545.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.