Amy Finkelstein, PhD, MPhil│BCFG/CHIBE Keynote Event

Speaker(s)

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  Amy Finkelstein, PhD, MPhil — John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Event Description

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Topic: “Facts and Fallacies: Rethinking US Healthcare.”

About the Talk: You’ve probably heard that one-quarter of spending on the elderly occurs in the last year of life, and that emergency rooms are the main source of healthcare for the uninsured. These widely-touted facts about the US health care system are all true. But the inferences commonly made based on these facts – such as ‘there’s a lot of waste in health care that can be easily cut since we’re spending a lot of money on people who are about to die anyway’, or ‘we can expand health insurance and save money by getting the uninsured out of the expensive emergency rooms and into cheaper and more effective primary care’ – are not. This talk explores these and several other widely-touted facts about the US healthcare system that are all true, and discusses the fallacies behind the inferences that have been made.

About the Speaker: Amy Finkelstein is the John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-founder and co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America, a research center at MIT that encourages and facilitates randomized evaluations of important domestic policy issues. She is also the founding Editor of American Economic Review: Insights and the co-Director of the Economics of Health Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Institute of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society.

Dr. Finkelstein’s areas of specialization are public finance and health economics. Her research focuses on market failures and government intervention in insurance markets, and on the economics of healthcare delivery. From 2008-2020 she served as co-Director of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her research, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2018) and the John Bates Clark Medal (2012), given annually to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. Other awards include an NIH MERIT Award (2020), the American Society of Health Economists’ ASHEcon Medal (2014), awarded biennially to the economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2009), the American Economic Association’s Elaine Bennett Research Prize (2008) and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007). She has also received awards for graduate student teaching and graduate student advising at MIT.

She received her PhD in Economics from MIT in 2001, an M.Phil in Economics from Oxford in 1997 where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and an A.B. in Government summa cum laude from Harvard in 1995. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2005, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Organizer(s)