Associate Investigator Mongan Institute Health Policy Center, Mass General Research Institute

Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

choice behavior; food preferences; housing; medicaid; nicotine replacement therapy; physicians family; public housing; smoking; smoking cessation; tobacco smoke pollution; tobacco treatment

Dr. Levy’s primary area of research is focused on studying how policies in the spheres of public health, healthcare finance, and health services can improve primary and higher order prevention to improve population health. The principal application of this overall research agenda is the study of policies to reduce the harms of tobacco use. His secondary research interest is using cost-effectiveness methods to help prioritize resource use and understand competing incentives to adopt alternative policies.

Dr. Levy’s research on tobacco has encompassed a number of avenues of inquiry. He has investigated the economics determinants and consequences of tobacco use, including the effect of cigarette price changes on smoking prevalence among pregnant women, the cost to employers of covering smoking cessation treatments, and national healthcare costs under alternative tobacco control scenarios. In addition to the economics of tobacco control, he has investigated clinical and epidemiological aspects of tobacco use and treatment, including the use of nicotine replacement therapy by smokers who are not trying to quit, the natural history of light and intermittent smoking, determinants of smoking cessation advice receipt among hospitalized smokers, and the cost-effectiveness of clinical strategies for reducing tobacco use. A major current focus of his tobacco research is studying the effects of smoke-free policies in public housing on involuntary tobacco smoke exposure, resident health, and resident health care expenditures.