Amitabh Chandra is an economist and a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His research focuses on productivity and cost-growth in healthcare and racial disparities in healthcare. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the Journal of Human Resources, Economics Letters, and the American Economic Journal. Professor Chandra has testified to the United States Senate, the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, and on National Public Radio. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award, the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, and the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research.

He was an IZA Research Fellow from January 2002 until October 2016.