Amitabh Chandra, PhD

Amitabh Chandra, PhD, is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and director of health policy research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Health Advisers, and a research associate at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany, and at the National Bureau of Economic Research. At Harvard, he teaches undergraduates in Harvard College and graduate students in the Kennedy School, Business School and Executive Education program.

Chandra’s research — which has been supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — focuses on innovation and cost growth in healthcare, medical malpractice and racial disparities in healthcare. He has published in the American Economic Review, The New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek and National Public Radio. He is an editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics and serves on the editorial boards of Economics Letters and the American Economic Journal.

Chandra has testified before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has been a consultant to the RAND Corporation, Microsoft Research, the Institute of Medicine and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation. In 2011 he served as Massachusetts’ special commissioner on provider price reform. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, and has received the Upjohn Institute’s Dissertation Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research and the American Society of Health Economists medal.

He earned a BA and PhD from the University of Kentucky, and an honorary MA from Harvard.