Health Economics Seminars

The Stanford Health Economics seminar series is jointly sponsored by the Departments of Economics and Health Policy, and brings top scholars and experts in the field of health economics to campus to deliver talks about their latest research and to meet with faculty and students. Our invited speakers span a broad range of research areas, including the determinants of population health and health disparities, health insurance and health care systems design, public insurance programs including Medicare and Medicaid, pharmaceutical drug policies and pricing, medical debt, global health, health care reforms, social policy and its influence on population health outcomes, and climate change and its impacts on health.

Here are our upcoming seminars for 2025:

Feb. 24: Anna Aizer

Anna Aizer, PhD, is the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a labor and health economist with interests in the area of child health and well-being. Her current work considers the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In particular, she focuses on the roles played by health insurance and access to medical care, domestic violence, exposure to environmental toxins, the role of stress, and poor children's greater interaction with the juvenile justice system in explaining why the children of poor mothers are more likely to grow up to be poor themselves.

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March 31: Amanda Kowalski

Amanda Kowalski, the Gail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, 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. Her 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.

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April 28: Steve Raphael

Steve Raphael is a Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and holds the James D. Marver Chair at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His research focuses on the economics of low-wage labor markets, housing, and the economics of crime and corrections. His most recent research focuses on the social consequences of the large increases in U.S. incarceration rates and racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. Raphael also works on immigration policy, research questions pertaining to various aspects of racial inequality, the economics of labor unions, social insurance policies, homelessness, and low-income housing.

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June 2: Andrew Goodman-Bacon

Andrew Goodman-Bacon is an economist at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His research is in economic history, health economics, public economics, and applied econometrics.

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