Amy Finkelstein

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.

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

Education Finkelstein studied government at Harvard University, where she was a Truman Scholar and received a 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". 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.

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

In 2020, Finklestein was named a codirectors of the NBER Health Care Program. The program was launched in 2000 under the leadership of Alan Garber, who is currently provost of Harvard University, to study the markets for health care services, health insurance, and the provision of medical care.

Contribution to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

A significant part of the research by Finkelstein has been to examine the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, the first large-scale, randomized, controlled study of Medicaid in the United States. Since 2008, Oregon has been using a lottery to assign Medicaid slots to uninsured, low-income adults in limited numbers. With the assistance of Katherine Baicker and a larger group of researchers, Finkelstein was able to design and evaluate this as a natural experiment. Their results showed significant increase in health-care access, both outpatient access and ED access, and decreased financial burden owing to catastrophic medical expenditures and medical debts. The study also reported better self-reported health and reduced cases of depression on new Medicaid beneficiaries.

The experiment transformed the empirical methodology of health economics through demonstrating that randomized designs can be applied to the large-scale study of public insurance programs. It also contributed significantly to national debate on Medicaid expansion in the process and after the adoption of the Affordable Care Act. The publications which followed are now amongst the most referred to in contemporary health policy studies and played a major role in making Finkelstein an acknowledged expert in public finance and health economics.

Research Finkelstein's primary expertise is in public finance and health economics, focusing particularly on health insurance. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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".

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. Her mother immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1940, where her maternal grandmother had earlier earned a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Warsaw.

Finkelstein is married to MIT economist Benjamin Olken.

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