Discipline(s):
Economics, Demography

Area(s) of Expertise:
Development Microeconomics, Economic Demography, Health Economics

E-Mail:
amar_hamoudi@ksg01.harvard.edu

Background:
Amar Hamoudi completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Economics at UCLA in 2007. His dissertation research focused on the ways that families organize their living arrangements. The central chapter of the dissertation explored the relationship between living arrangements and economic preferences. It reports empirical patterns which would be predicted by an economic model in which one of the factors affecting the family’s living arrangements is its motivation to diversify spatially-defined economic risk, but in which the family’s ability to share risk is constrained by each member’s incentives to play his or her appointed role in any risk sharing scheme. In the process of completing his dissertation, Amar was involved in the design and implementation of a pilot study aimed at measuring several domains of economic preferences in a population-representative sample of two Mexican states. As a Health and Society Scholar, Amar intends to explore the relationship between these types of preferences and health related behaviors—for example, does financial risk aversion, or economic forward-lookingness, relate to individuals’ investments in their own or their children’s health? In addition, he hopes to explore some of the biological correlates of these preferences, in order to shed light on both the process of preference formation and on some of the relationships between economic and health outcomes. Prior to his doctoral studies, Amar completed a Masters’ Degree in International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he was involved in data collection and analysis in a cost-effectiveness study of Botswana’s national HIV treatment program.

Journal Articles:
Click here for a list of Amar Hamoudi's available publications in PubMed.