Christopher Carpenter

Professor Carpenter is a health and labor economist who studies the effects of public policies on health and family outcomes. He is Vice President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (through Nov 2019), Vice President of the Southern Economic Association (starting Nov 2019), a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Health Economists (through 2022), and Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession. At Vanderbilt he directs the Program in Public Policy Studies and the TIPS-supported Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab, and he is the faculty facilitator for Q&A (Queer & Asian). With interdisciplinary research teams he is studying the effects of legal access to same-sex marriage in the United States and Europe. He has also published extensively on the causes and consequences of youth substance use and on other health behaviors such as bicycle helmet use, seatbelt use, cancer screening, and vaccination. His research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Cancer Society. Professor Carpenter is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Editor at the Journal of Health Economics. He also serves on the Editorial Boards of American Journal of Health Economics and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.