Amanda Kowalski, Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale University Department of Economics and Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), is a health economist who specializes in applying econometric techniques to answer questions that inform current debates in health policy.
Professor Kowalski’s recent research explores the early impact of the Affordable Care Act. Her previous research focused on the impact of the 2006 Massachusetts health reform with an eye toward the likely impact of the Affordable Care Act, focusing specifically on hospital care, labor market outcomes, and adverse selection in the individual health insurance market. She has also researched the price elasticity of expenditure on medical care and the marginal returns to medical spending on at-risk newborns using new estimation techniques. Her research has received the Zellner Thesis Award, the HCUP Outstanding Article of the Year Award, and the Garfield Economic Impact Award.
In 2014, Professor Kowalski was honored with a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute have also supported her research, which has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Public Economics. Her research has also been featured in the popular press, including The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
Professor Kowalski holds a PhD in economics from MIT and an AB in economics from Harvard. Before joining Yale, she held a post-doctoral fellowship in Health and Aging at the NBER in Cambridge, MA. 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 is spending the 2015-2016 academic year on Associate Professor Leave from Yale as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
