Yasin Civelek is a health economist and Assistant Professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, University of Arizona. His research examines how health systems and public insurance shape health care utilization, spending, and equity, particularly for underserved populations. His work is organized around two areas. The first is health system performance, where he studies how financing, provider incentives, payment models, and market structure shape outcomes, and how resilient health systems are to shocks such as climate change and recurring natural disasters. The second is public insurance coverage and its long-run health and fiscal impacts across the life course. He uses large administrative datasets and quasi-experimental methods to generate causal, policy-relevant evidence. His research has been published in leading health policy journals, including JAMA and Health Affairs.

 

Before joining Arizona, he was a Research Associate in the Division of Health Policy and Economics at Weill Cornell Medicine (2023–2026) and a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Health Policy Center (2024–2026). He previously was a Senior Researcher on the Health Economics Research Team at Elevance Health (2020–2023) and a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (2023–2025), where he designed field experiments on health care delivery in under-resourced settings. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics from Georgia State University.