Newhouse and HCP Chair Nicole Maestas at the 2026 ASSA meeting.
The American Economic Association honored Joseph P. Newhouse, Research Professor and John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management (Emeritus) as a 2025 Distinguished Fellow. This award recognizes lifetime contributions of distinguished economists.
Throughout his distinguished career at Harvard and previously at RAND, Newhouse has fundamentally shaped how economists understand the health care system through rigorous empirical analysis. His design and direction of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment—a pioneering social science study—provided crucial evidence that medical utilization responds to out-of-pocket costs, directly informing the development of cost-sharing policies used today.
Beyond his groundbreaking research on medical care costs and technological innovation, Newhouse has been instrumental in building the health economics field itself. He founded the Journal of Health Economics, led the International Health Economics Association, and served as the inaugural President of the American Society of Health Economists. His mentorship has inspired generations of scholars to pursue health economics research.
A member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Newhouse continues to influence health policy at the national and international level.
Read more about this honor on the American Economic Association's site here.