Adam Leive is an assistant professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and in the Department of Economics (by courtesy) at the University of Virginia. He is a health economist with research interests at the intersection of consumer decision-making, household finance, and public economics.

He uses large administrative datasets to study policy-relevant questions about individual behavior in a range of insurance programs. His primary area of research seeks to understand consumer behavior in important and complicated life-cycle decisions, focusing on health insurance and saving. He studies how consumer choices in these domains affect market outcomes and how policy can improve household financial security and economic welfare.

A large set of his work focuses on Health Savings Accounts, which aim to lower health care costs by offering tax incentives encouraging people to trade off current consumption against future consumption. By studying links between insurance, saving, and employment that have been relatively unexplored, his research aims to produce novel insights about how people respond to incentives in complex life-cycle decisions. He is also interested in how these choices, and broader economic forces, can influence inequalities in both financial resources and health.    

At Batten, Leive has taught courses on research methods and data analysis, and the economics of social insurance and means-tested programs.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and his B.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Before graduate school, he worked at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, DC. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Social Security Administration, TIAA Institute, and Pension Research Council.