Short answers, pulled from the story.
Amy Finkelstein is best known for her work on the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, the first large-scale randomized controlled study of Medicaid in the United States. She is a professor of economics at MIT and was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2012 by the American Economic Association, which cited her research as a model of combining theory and empirics.
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found that newly enrolled Medicaid patients made more overall visits to health-care providers, including more emergency room visits, and experienced reduced financial burdens from catastrophic medical expenses and medical debts. The study also reported improved self-reported health and fewer cases of depression among new Medicaid beneficiaries.
Finkelstein received the Elaine Bennett Research Prize in 2008, the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 2012, and a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2018. She was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Finkelstein earned a BA in government from Harvard University in 1995, graduating summa cum laude as a Truman Scholar. She then studied at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, receiving an M.Phil. in economics in 1997. She completed her PhD in economics at MIT in 2001 under supervisors James M. Poterba and Jonathan Gruber.
Finkelstein is a professor of economics at MIT and held the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor chair from 2016 for a five-year term. At the National Bureau of Economic Research, she serves as co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program, and became co-director of the NBER Health Care Program in 2020.
Beginning in 2008, Oregon used a lottery to assign limited Medicaid slots to uninsured low-income adults because demand exceeded availability. Finkelstein and Katherine Baicker recognized this as a natural experiment and designed a rigorous evaluation, making it the first large-scale randomized controlled study of Medicaid in the United States.