Harvard Economist Nicole Maestas on Aging and Health Policy

During Nicole Maestas’s Napa Valley childhood, everything was grapes. Though her father worked in the wine finance business, the future MacArthur professor of economics and health care policy showed interest in neither farming nor money. At Wellesley College, she studied English. After graduation, the Bay Area beckoned. There, she met her husband in a community jazz band (she played alto sax, he electric bass). While researching education policy, she became fascinated with “poverty policy,” which led to an M.P.P. at the University of California, Berkeley. Economics, she thought, provided the best analysis of America’s social safety net, and her master’s developed into an economics Ph.D. Her dissertation, advised by labor economist and future Nobel Prize winner David Card, analyzed couples’ joint retirement behavior—women retire earlier, leaving the workforce alongside their (generally older) husbands. After Berkeley, Maestas joined the nonprofit research organization RAND Corporation, primarily studying disability insurance, retirement economics, and health economics. Some of her work there differed from traditional academia: a six-month consulting contract for the Social Security Administration gave her an insider’s insight into the sprawling organization. In 2015, she joined Harvard Medical School’s department of healthcare policy, becoming its chair in November 2024. Recently, she began investigating enrollment declines in disability insurance, which have dropped more than expected as baby boomers age out. She believes the program, fearing fraud, overcorrected and may be excluding eligible working-age adults. When not researching, Maestas can be found in her backyard vegetable garden, a COVID-era project that now includes onions, cabbage, eggplants, and flowers: dahlias, asters, and many others. (It also inadvertently houses a rabbit family.) After she harvests, her husband cooks the veggies for her and their three children, adopted from Guatemala. Though Maestas once spurned farming and money, the economist now treasures her time in the weeds.