Dr. Laura Dague, an associate professor in the PSAA department, earned a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin. Her doctoral fields of study were public economics and labor economics. She is a Faculty Research Fellow in the NBER’s Health Economics program and holds affiliations with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, the Texas A&M Department of Economics and the Texas A&M School of Public Health.

Dr. Dague’s research interests are in health economics, particularly the economics of public health insurance. Her recent publications focus on changes in the Medicaid program and their relation to federal health care reform. Current projects continue this work by considering how transitional Medicaid affects job transitions, the role of public insurance options in certain markets, and the effects of expanding Medicaid to nontraditional populations such as low-income adults without dependent children. Dr. Dague is currently working on a formal evaluation of Wisconsin’s most recent Medicaid waiver, funded by the State of Wisconsin, and on Medicaid and retirement through the NBER’s Retirement Research Center. She is also studying how Texas hospitals use Medicaid funds. Her work has been published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Health Affairs, Health Services Research, Inquiry, and Medicaid and Medicare Research Review.

Dr. Dague was the winner of the 2015 National Institute for Health Care Management’s research award for her work on Medicaid premiums. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, received a dissertation research award from the Institute for Research on Poverty, and was a fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Dr. Dague’s research team has been funded by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and the State of Wisconsin Department of Health Services.