Cagdas Agirdas

Cagdas Agirdas serves as an Associate Professor in the Economics Department within the John Sykes College of Business at The University of Tampa, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses including Health Economics, Econometrics, and Public Economics.

His academic credentials include a B.S. from Bogazici University (2002), M.A. from Central Michigan University (2004), and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2011).

Agirdas' research spans Health Economics and Media Economics, with significant contributions analyzing the Affordable Care Act's impact on insurance premiums and preventive care disparities, Medicaid expansions' labor market effects, and microeconomic drivers of media bias following newspaper closures. His work combines rigorous empirical methods with policy-relevant questions.

Recent publications reveal a strong focus on health policy evaluation using natural experiments, particularly examining ACA marketplace competition and racial disparities in care access, while his media economics research pioneers methodologies linking market structure to ideological bias in news coverage.

His exceptional teaching has been recognized through multiple awards:

• Graduate Professor of the Year at The University of Tampa (2015-2016)
• Robert E. Demarest Memorial Teaching Award at Illinois (4 consecutive years)
• 17 semesters on Illinois' Teachers Ranked as Excellent list (12 in top 10%)

As an active Southern Economic Association and American Economic Association member, Agirdas develops custom course packets replacing textbooks across 10 economics courses and implements structured classroom debates to enhance student engagement with complex economic concepts.