John Cawley is a Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Department of Economics, at Cornell University. He is co-Director of Cornell’s Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors and Disparities. His research focuses on the economics of risky health behaviors; in particular, those that relate to obesity.

In addition to his affiliation with Cornell, John is the Erasmus Initiative Visiting Professor of Health Economics at the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands and an Honorary Professor of Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute in the Netherlands, and a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee “Prevention of Obesity in Children and Youth” and has served on advisory boards and expert panels for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government agencies.

John serves as an Editor of the Journal of Health Economics.

For his research, John has received the Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, the John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration, and the Charles C. Shepard Science Award in Prevention and Control from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During 2016 John served as a Fulbright Specialist in Economics to Ireland. John is also a two-time recipient of the Kappa Omicron Nu / Human Ecology Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Advising of students.

Prior to arriving at Cornell, John was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 1999-2001. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University.