Katherine Sacks is an Associate Director in health economics within the Research Department. Prior to joining the Milken Institute, Sacks was part of the team creating a State Safety-net Generosity Index, and she has been working to quantify the regulations governing social assistance programs in the United States across all states since the advent of welfare reform in the 1990s. Her research incorporates novel methodological approaches to combine program rules into a measure of safety-net generosity in each state in a given year, which she has used to examine the relative assistance climates of different states. She also researches the social determinants of health, focusing on adverse maternal birth outcomes, and the effects of the social safety net on measures of population health. Sacks holds an MA and PhD in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from Barnard College.