Amelia Hawkins

Amelia is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brandeis University. Her primary fields are public finance and labor economics. In her research she explores how social insurance and public assistance programs affect decision making of individuals and firms, with a particular focus on the implications of these decisions for the labor market. She is also especially interested in how deterioration in health or low initial health endowments affect individual and household employment and well-being, what private and public resources people draw upon in those events and how they value those transfers, and how the design of social insurance and public transfer programs - programs which aim to palliate the risks of unexpected income loss - affect these outcomes in intended and unintended ways.

Amelia received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2019. She spent the following year at the National Bureau of Economic Research as a postdoctoral fellow in Retirement and Disability Policy Research. Her dissertation is titled “Three Essays on the Interplay between Social Insurance, Transfer Programs and Labor Markets” and won Honorable Mention for the National Tax Association's 2020 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation as well as the 2018 John E. Parker Memorial Prize in Labor Economics and Human Resources from the University of Michigan. Amelia worked as a Research Associate at the Urban Institute from 2009-2012 and graduated magna cum laude with honors in Economics from Williams College in 2008.