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 experiments, models grounded in context-specific knowledge, and econometric techniques to answer questions that inform current debates in health policy.

Professor Kowalski’s recent research analyzes experiments and clinical trials with the goal of designing policies to target insurance expansions and medical treatments to individuals who will benefit from them most. Her previous research has explored impacts of health insurance through Medicaid expansions, the Affordable Care Act, the Massachusetts health reform of 2006, and employer-sponsored plans.  She has also examined impacts of health spending on at-risk newborns.

Professor Kowalski is the 2019 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal, awarded by the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) to “an economist aged 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics.” She has also been honored with a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Zellner Thesis Award in Econometrics and Statistics from the American Statistical Association, and the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research from Yale University. Her research has received the HCUP Outstanding Article of the Year Award, the Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for the Best Research in Health Econometrics, the Garfield Economic Impact Award, and the National Institute of Health Care Management Research Award. The National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute have supported her research, which has been published in top general interest journals in economics, 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 an elected member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (AEA) and of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon). She is a Research Associate at the NBER in the Economics of Health, Public Economics, and Aging programs. She holds a 2008 PhD in economics from MIT and a 2003 AB in economics from Harvard. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2018, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale Department of Economics. Before joining Yale in 2009, she held a postdoctoral 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 from 2003-2004, and another as the Okun Model Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2011-2012. 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. During her 2024-2025 sabbatical, she is making short visits to Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Yale.