Who: Up-and-coming health economist at MIT

House: Dunster

Hometown: Manhattan

Current Residence: Cambridge

Spotlight: With a skyrocketing portion of the nation’s output going to healthcare spending—thrice as much today as in 1960—observers both professional and lay have asked the same question: WTF? The bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Amy Finkelstein may have the beginnings of the weird, head-scratch–inducing answer. In a forthcoming article (PDF) in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics, she uses fancy statistical footwork to show that the advent of Medicare may be responsible for about half of the increase in per-capita health spending between 1950 and 1990. In other words, giving old people insurance makes healthcare more expensive for everyone, in part because the inventors of new, costly medical technologies know they can expect a big, subsidized market for their wares. BusinessWeek, always down for a round of “blame the grandparents,” bestowed mad props to Finkelstein for her insights; megablogger and economist Tyler Cowen, Ph.D. '87, called her paper "important" and "juicy."

Distinctions: Truman scholar, Hoopes Prize winner, Marshall scholar at Oxford, junior fellow at Harvard. You out there, the fledgling academic: you might as well give up now.

Statistically Significant Other: In 2005, Finkelstein married Benjamin Olken, A.M. ’02, Ph.D. ’04, an economist who specializes in corruption, Indonesia, and corruption in Indonesia. Both have worked at various times at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, a think tank that apparently doubles as a singles bar for social scientists; it’s not for nothing that Claudia Goldin, a Harvard econ professor, dubbed it “the National Bureau of Economic Romance.”

All in the Family: If this is getting a little too cute for you, consider that Finkelstein and Olken’s love blossomed during a seminar exploring the theory, now made infamous by Freakonomics, that Roe v. Wade is largely responsible for declining crime rates in the US. Nothing gets that mojo working like the seductive soundtrack of drug use and legalized abortion.

*The Aggregate Effects of Health Insurance: Evidence from the Introduction of Medicare [NBER]
*So That's Why It's So Expensive [BusinessWeek]
*An important paper on health care economics [Marginal Revolution]
*Ben & Amy’s Wedding [NBER/Ben Olken]