Departmental Affiliations
Center & Institute Affiliations
Rajeev Cherukupalli, PhD, MA, works in public finance, health, development, labor markets and policy evaluation, to harness better tax and policy design to improve health.
Research Interests
economics; public finance; international development; health taxes; tobacco taxation; adverse selection in health insurance
Experiences & Accomplishments
Rajeev Cherukupalli (he/his) is an economist with research and practice interests in public finance, health, development, labor markets and policy evaluation.
He has published on fiscal policy, behavioral economics, tobacco control, obesity and cardiovascular health, and has researched the domestic health insurance market. Cherukupalli has advised ministries of finance and health in designing and implementing better fiscal policies. He has supported philanthropic, technical, legislative, and advocacy efforts on tax policy and the economics and policy solutions to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). He has an abiding interest in communicating the economics of NCDs and fiscal policy to wide audiences.
Cherukupalli led economic analysis on the World Health Organization (Geneva) team responsible for the 2017 Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic. He serves as a technical reviewer for the Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health (2017-present) and the Cardiovascular Health initiative of Resolve to Save Lives (2019-present). He edited a series of white papers on tobacco taxation in low- and middle-income countries for the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use that have been used as the basis for technical tax reforms and advocacy.
Honors & Awards
Global Health Day Excellence in Advising Award, Center for Global Health (2019)
Reviewer of the Year, Tobacco Control (2015)
Select Publications
Selected articles
Cherukupalli, R, Frieden, TR (2020). “Only Saving Lives Will Save Livelihoods”. Foreign Affairs, May 13 2020.
Cherukupalli, R. A behavioral economics perspective on tobacco taxation. Am J Public Health. 2010 Apr;100(4):609-15. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.160838. PMID: 20220113; PMCID: PMC2836334.
Cherukupalli R. Korea's 2015 cigarette tax increases. Tob Control. 2016 Mar;25(2):123-4. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2014-052104. Epub 2015 Feb 11. PMID: 25673328.
Kostova D, Ochieng W, Cherukupalli R, Redd JT. "U.S. trade indicators and epidemics: Lessons from the 2003 SARS outbreak," Economics Bulletin, 2020 AccessEcon, vol. 40(4), pages 2610-2618. https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-20-00932.html.
Kaplan B, Cherukupalli R, Welding K, Kennedy RD, Cohen JE. The youth e-cigarette epidemic: New estimates of JUUL Labs’ revenue from youth users in the US. Tobacco Induced Diseases. 2021;19(May):33. doi:10.18332/tid/133874.