Biography

UNLV Lee Business School professor Makayla Lavender studies studies how policies impact health insurance demand and other related consumer decisions. Her expertise is used to provide insight into health policies in Nevada and the economics surrounding them.

Lavender has conducted research on policies impacting insurance for low to middle-income individuals like Medicaid and subsidized Marketplace insurance. She has focused on a range of populations, including mothers and infants, foster children, and teens using tobacco. For example, some of her work has centered around how Medicaid and Marketplace eligibility under the Affordable Care Act affected insurance enrollment, pregnancies, and labor decisions. She has also researched how the flavored tobacco ban and laws raising the tobacco purchasing age to 21 have impacted teen tobacco use. Other work has addressed how Medicare covering advance care planning has reduced disparities in who was having those conversations.

Her work has been published in the Health Affairs, Health Economics, and the Southern Economic Journal.