Policy Punchline

What causes enduring unemployment? What are the impacts of housing booms and manufacturing decline on employment growth? How can we come up with potential solutions for rising healthcare costs? How should we reconcile normative judgments and empirical analysis in debates about issues like unemployment and healthcare?   An applied microeconomist, Prof. Matthew Notowidigdo studies a broad set of topics in labor and health economics using a variety of empirical approaches. In labor economics, his research has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of unemployment duration dependence (state dependence in unemployment), the incidence of local labor demand shocks, and the economic effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle. One theme across all of these topics is using variation in local labor market conditions to inform economic theories and learn new facts about the labor market. Prof. Notowidigdo’s research in health economics focuses on the effects of public health insurance on labo