About

Professor Marcella Alsan is involved in studying the causes and consequences of health inequality. Her work aims to develop and investigate evidence-based, scalable strategies to reduce health disparities. She has contributed to research on topics such as medical mistrust and representation in healthcare, emphasizing the importance of understanding cultural and social factors that influence health outcomes. Her engagement includes participating in seminars and podcasts that explore the intersection of health, culture, and policy, and she has been recognized for her contributions to the field, including being felicitated at the 2026 Symposium for Humboldt Research Award Winners.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Information Retrieval
• Law
• Environmental health
• Nursing
• Gerontology
• Demography

Selected publications

• Understanding and Estimating U.S. Physicians Preferences for Unionization

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2026-01-02

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Understanding and Estimating U.S. Physicians Preferences for Unionization

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2026-01-02

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Private Equity’s Transformation of American Medicine — Implications for Health Equity

  New England Journal of Medicine · 2026-02-28 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Understanding and Estimating U.S. Physicians Preferences for Unionization

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2026-01-02

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Culture and Health

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Something Works” in U.S. Jails: Misconduct and Recidivism Effects of the IGNITE Program

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025-01-20 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A long-standing and influential view in U.S. correctional policy is that “nothing works” when it comes to rehabilitating incarcerated individuals. We revisit this hypothesis by studying an innovative law-enforcement-led program launched in the county jail of Flint, MI: Inmate Growth Naturally and Intentionally through Education (IGNITE). We develop an instrumental variables approach to estimate the effects of IGNITE exposure, leveraging quasi-random court delays that cause individuals to spend more time in jail before and after the program’s launch. Holding time in jail fixed, we find that one additional month of IGNITE exposure reduces weekly misconduct in jail by 25% and three-month recidivism by 24%, with the recidivism effects growing over time. Surveys of staff and community members, along with administrative test-score records and within-jail text messages, suggest that cultural change and improved literacy and numeracy scores are contributing mechanisms.

  PublisherDOI

• Mean Reversion in Randomized Controlled Trials: Implications for Program Targeting and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2025-05-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Eligibility criteria for interventions can induce an Ashenfelter Dip, and subsequent mean reversion results in improvement over time even absent the intervention. We investigate these dynamics for a food-as-medicine program to treat diabetes, where eligibility required elevated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). Both treatment and control groups experienced significant improvements in HbA1c, resulting in an estimated null effect. When we predict improvement using baseline characteristics, we find that subjects who are unlikely to improve on their own appear to benefit from the program. Our findings have implications for program targeting and estimating heterogeneous treatment effects.

  PublisherDOI

• The Hidden Health Care Crisis Behind Bars: A Randomized Trial to Accredit U.S. Jails

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with over seven million admissions to jails each year.Incarcerated individuals are the only group in the U.S. that have a constitutional right to receiving "reasonably adequate" health care.Yet, there is little oversight and funding for health care in jails, where adverse health outcomes such as mortality are known to be underreported.This setting is also one characterized by limited information among law enforcement regarding health care standards, and coordination problems between custody and medical staff who together produce inmate health.We randomize the offer of health care accreditation, which provides education and training on evidence-based industry standards, to 44 jails across the U.S. We find accreditation improves quality standards and reduces mortality among the incarcerated, which is three times higher among control facilities than official estimates suggest.Surveys of staff indicate that accreditation improves coordination between health and custody staff, and audits of medical records find enhanced screening of inmates upon admission.These health gains are realized alongside suggestive reductions in six-month recidivism, such that accreditation is highly cost effective.

  PublisherDOI

• Culture and Health

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prescription for Division—Healing the Growing Gap in Physician Trust

  JAMA Health Forum · 2025-12-18

  articleOpen access1st author

  This JAMA Forum discusses the erosion of physician trust after the COVID-19 pandemic and provides short- and long-term suggestions for repairing the patient-physician relationship.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Infectious Diseases,Technology and Mortality Convergence

  NIH · $398k · 2015–2018

• Behavioral Intervention Development Core

  NIH · $17.2M · 2009–2029

• The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Health of Black Men

  NIH · $170k · 2017–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Marianne Wanamaker

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  127 shared

• Emily Breza

  77 shared

• Arun G. Chandrasekhar

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  74 shared

• Benjamin Olken

  55 shared

• Esther Duflo

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  52 shared

• Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham

  Yale University

  44 shared

• Abhijit Banerjee

  40 shared

• Jay Bhattacharya

  Stanford University

  32 shared

Labs

• Health Inequality LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Stanford University

  2006

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2001

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998