Rate My Professor Kowalski Kowalski

Amanda Kowalski is the Gail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics and Public Policy in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan. She earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 and an A.B. in Economics with High Honors from Harvard University in 2003. Her professional trajectory includes serving as Professor of Economics at Michigan since 2018, Associate Professor at Yale University from 2015 to 2018, Assistant Professor at Yale from 2009 to 2015, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Health Care and Aging at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 2008 to 2009, and Research Assistant in Health and Labor at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2004. Additional appointments encompass Visiting Associate Professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in 2015-2016 and at Princeton Department of Economics in 2017-2018. Kowalski holds positions as Research Associate at NBER in the programs on Health Economics, Public Economics, and Aging, member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association, and Board of Directors member for the American Society of Health Economists.

As a health economist, Kowalski focuses on integrating theoretical models grounded in context-specific knowledge, econometric techniques, and data from experiments and clinical trials to inform health policy. Her research addresses targeting insurance expansions such as Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and Massachusetts health reform, alongside evaluating medical spending impacts on at-risk newborns and mammography screening behaviors. Key publications include "Estimating Marginal Returns to Medical Care: Evidence from At-Risk Newborns" (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010), "Adverse Selection and an Individual Mandate: When Theory Meets Practice" (American Economic Review, 2015), "Mandate-Based Health Reform and the Labor Market: Evidence from the Massachusetts Reform" (Journal of Health Economics, 2016), "Behaviour within a Clinical Trial and Implications for Mammography Guidelines" (Review of Economic Studies, 2023), and "Reconciling Seemingly Contradictory Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment and the Massachusetts Health Reform" (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2023). She has garnered major awards including the ASHEcon Medal (2019), Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for Best Research in Health Econometrics (2023), NSF CAREER Award (2014), NIHCM Research Award (2016), Zellner Thesis Award (2009), and Yale Arthur Greer Memorial Prize (2016). Funding from the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation supports her work, which has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.