Nicole Maestas

Nicole Maestas is an American economist who is the Margaret T. Morris Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where she directs the NBER’s Retirement and Disability Research Center.

Biography
Nicole Maestas earned a BA in English and Spanish from Wellesley College in 1991. She then received her M.P.P. in Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley in 1997, and her Ph.D. in Economics also from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to joining the faculty at the Harvard Medical School, she worked at the RAND Corporation, where she served as director of the Economics, Sociology, and Statistics Research Department as well as in other leadership roles and taught in the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Research
Nicole Maestas studies the economics of disability insurance, labor markets, health care systems, and population aging. Her research studies how the health and disability insurance systems affect individual economic behaviors, such as labor supply and the use of medical care. Dr. Maestas’ research has shown how the federal disability insurance system discourages employment by people with disabilities. In other work she has examined how population aging affects economic growth, how individuals value their working conditions, and the effects of state Medicaid policies on the health care and well-being of people receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. In current work, Dr. Maestas is investigating the causes and consequences of the opioid epidemic and how the provider landscape shapes disparities in access to mental health care, and she is developing new methods of measuring work capacity. Dr. Maestas has published widely in the leading journals of economics, policy and medicine.

Selected works

 * Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand. 2013. "Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt." American Economic Review, 103 (5): 1797–1829.


 * Card, David, Carlos Dobkin, and Nicole Maestas. 2008. "The Impact of Nearly Universal Insurance Coverage on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Medicare." American Economic Review, 98 (5): 2242–58.


 * Zhu, W., Chernew, M.E., Sherry, T.B. and Maestas, N., 2019. Initial opioid prescriptions among US commercially insured patients, 2012–2017. New England Journal of Medicine, 380(11), pp.1043-1052.


 * Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen, and David Powell. 2023. "The Effect of Population Aging on Economic Growth, the Labor Force, and Productivity." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 15 (2): 306–32.


 * Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen, David Powell, Till von Wachter, and Jeffrey B. Wenger. 2023. "The Value of Working Conditions in the United States and the Implications for the Structure of Wages." American Economic Review, 113 (7): 2007–47.