Gopi Shah Goda is a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries. From July 2021 to July 2022, Gopi served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She also served as SIEPR's Deputy Director from September 2016 to July 2021.
Gopi conducts research that informs how policy can best serve aging populations. She studies the sustainability of public programs serving the elderly, how individuals make healthcare, saving and retirement decisions as they age, and the broader implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, labor supply and entitlement programs. Her recent research examines the effects of long-term care insurance on family members’ work and location decisions, and how COVID-19 illness affects U.S. workers. Her work has appeared in a variety of leading economics journals, and has been supported by the Social Security Administration, the National Institutes on Aging, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the TIAA Institute.
Gopi is passionate about bridging the gap between research and practice to ensure that scholarship culminates in evidence-based solutions to pressing social problems. Her work has garnered coverage in major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, the Guardian, and the San Francisco Chronicle. It has also frequently been cited in policy discourse, including government reports, agency rulemaking, and legislative bodies. Through her teaching, Gopi aims to train the next generation of economic policy experts and scholars to interpret and critically evaluate research findings, understand their policy implications, perform empirical analysis, and communicate economic ideas clearly and effectively.
Prior to joining SIEPR in 2009, Gopi was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University. She earned her PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2007 and her B.S. in mathematics and actuarial science from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 2000.