Matthew J. Notowidigdo studies labor economics, public finance, and health economics. His dissertation studies the economics of local labor markets, focusing on how social insurance and housing prices affect the incentives to migrate following local labor demand shocks. His recent work explores on how employers evaluate workers with long unemployment spells. His recent papers include “Peer Effects in the Workplace: Evidence from Random Groupings in Professional Golf Tournaments” (written jointly with Jon Guryan and Kory Kroft) was published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in 2009 and his paper “Health Insurance and the Consumer Bankruptcy Decision: Evidence from Medicaid” (written jointly with Tal Gross) was published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2011.
Outside of academia, Notowidigdo has corporate experience as an associate at Lehman Brothers in the Fixed Income Division, and he has consulted for several professional sports teams on ticket pricing. Within academia he has teaching experience at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and he was honored with the distinction of the Carleton E. Tucker Award for Teaching Excellence in 2004.
Notowidigdo studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining Chicago Booth in 2010. He holds a BS in economics, a BS in computer engineering, a MEng in computer science, and a PhD in economics. He is currently a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research.
Selected Publications
With Amy Finkelstein and Erzo Luttmer, “What Good is Wealth Without Health? The Effect of Health on the Marginal Utility of Consumption,” Journal of the European Economic Association (forthcoming).
With Daron Acemoglu and Amy Finkelstein, “Income and Health Spending: Evidence from Oil Price Shocks,” Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming).
With Tal Gross, “Health Insurance and the Consumer Bankruptcy Decision: Evidence from Medicaid,” Journal of Public Economics (2011).
With Jon Guryan and Kory Kroft, “Peer Effects in the Workplace: Evidence from Random Groupings in Professional Golf Tournaments,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2009).
With Amy Finkelstein and Erzo Luttmer, “Approaches to Estimating the Health State Dependence of the Utility Function,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (2009).
REVISION: Liquidity Constraints and Consumer Bankruptcy: Evidence from Tax Rebates
Date Posted: May 10, 2012
This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 income tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates caused a significant, short-run increase in consumer bankruptcies in both years, with larger effects in 2008 when the rebates were more generous and more widely distributed. Using hand-collected
New: What Good is Wealth Without Health? The Effect of Health on the Marginal Utility of Consumption
Date Posted: Jul 14, 2009
We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health and Retirement Study’s panel data on the elderly and near-elderly, and proxy for utility with measures of subjective well-being. We find robust evidence that the marginal utility of consumption declines as h
New: Income and Health Spending: Evidence from Oil Price Shocks
Date Posted: May 19, 2009
Health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century. A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. Thi
New: Income and Health Spending: Evidence from Oil Price Shocks
Date Posted: Feb 25, 2009
Health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century. A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. Thi
New: Approaches to Estimating the Health State Dependence of the Utility Function
Date Posted: Jan 19, 2009
If the marginal utility of consumption depends on health status, this will affect the economic analysis of a number of central problems in public finance, including the optimal structure of health insurance and optimal life cycle savings. In this paper, we describe the promises and challenges of various approaches to estimating the effect of health on the marginal utility of consumption. Our basic conclusion is that while none of these approaches is a panacea, many offer the potential to shed im
New: Approaches to Estimating the Health State Dependence of the Utility Function
Date Posted: Jan 14, 2009
If the marginal utility of consumption depends on health status, this will affect the economic analysis of a number of central problems in public finance, including the optimal structure of health insurance and optimal life cycle savings. In this paper, we describe the promises and challenges of various approaches to estimating the effect of health on the marginal utility of consumption. Our basic conclusion is that while none of these approaches is a panacea, many offer the potential to shed i
New: Peer Effects in the Workplace: Evidence from Random Groupings in Professional Golf Tournaments
Date Posted: Nov 12, 2007
This paper uses the random assignment of playing partners in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that the ability of playing partners affects the performance of professional golfers, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace from laboratory experiments, grocery scanners, and soft-fruit pickers. In our preferred specification, we can rule out peer effects larger than 0.045 strokes for a one stroke increase in playing part