Rate My Professor David Molitor

David Molitor is an Associate Professor of Finance and Hewitt Faculty Fellow in the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of Gies Health Initiatives since 2023. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Minnesota in 2007. Before joining the University of Illinois in 2013 as Assistant Professor of Finance, Molitor was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research from 2012 to 2013. He holds additional appointments as Assistant Professor by courtesy in the Department of Economics since 2013, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2014, Affiliated Professor at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab since 2019, and Research Associate at the Center for Business and Public Policy.

Molitor's research focuses on health economics, environmental economics, and labor economics, with emphasis on air pollution effects, temperature adaptation, workplace wellness programs, physician practice styles, and the causal effects of place on health and longevity. As Principal Investigator of the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a large-scale field experiment, his research program has received over $10 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Social Security Administration, J-PAL North America, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Key publications include 'The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction' (American Economic Review, 2019, with Deryugina, Heutel, Miller, and Reif), winner of the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for best paper in health economics; 'What Do Workplace Wellness Programs Do? Evidence from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study' (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019, with Jones and Reif), recipient of the NIHCM Foundation Research Award; 'Does When You Die Depend on Where You Live? Evidence from Hurricane Katrina' (American Economic Review, 2020, with Deryugina); and 'Air Pollution and the Labor Market: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke' (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024, with Borgschulte and Zou). His work has been published in leading journals and covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Molitor has received the Conrad W. and Shirley A. Hewitt Fellowship, Deloitte Scholar, Arnold O. Beckman Research Award, RC Evans Data Analytics Scholar, and Best Professor award for teaching at Illinois.