Amy Finkelstein is the John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Finkelstein's areas of specialization are public finance and health economics. She has received numerous awards for her research, including a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Fellowship (2018) and the John Bates Clark Medal (2012), given annually to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. She has also received awards for graduate student teaching and graduate student advising at MIT.
She is the co-founder and co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America, a research center at MIT that encourages and facilitates randomized evaluations of important domestic policy issues. She is also the founding Editor of American Economic Review: Insights and the co-Director of the Economics of Health Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Institute of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society.
She received her Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 2001, an M.Phil in Economics from Oxford in 1997 where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and an A.B. in Government summa cum laude from Harvard in 1995. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2005, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.