Laura Dague, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at Texas A&M's Bush School of Government & Public Service. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin, where she studied public economics and labor economics. She is a Research Associate in the NBER’s Health Economics program and holds affiliations with the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty, the Texas A&M Department of Economics, and the Texas A&M School of Public Health. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Health Economics.
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 and the effects of expanding Medicaid to nontraditional populations such as low-income adults without dependent children. Dr. Dague is also working on a formal evaluation of Wisconsin’s most recent Medicaid waiver, funded by the State of Wisconsin, and is examining how Medicaid can influence employment and reincarceration for former prisoners. She has a new project using machine learning to understand the role of paid leave on work decisions and financial security. Her work has been published in journals including 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. Dr. Dague’s research has been funded by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, the Episcopal Health Foundation, the Equitable Growth Foundation, 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.