He is also a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University in 2015-16. Gottlieb completed his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2012. He won the 2015 Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics and the 2012 National Tax Association Dissertation Award. Gottlieb's work has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, and Journal of Labor Economics. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the National Institute on Aging have supported his research.