Marcella Alsan

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

• 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 hea…

  PublisherDOI

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

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

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Eligibility criteria for interventions can induce an Ashenfelter Dip, and subsequent mean-reversion may result 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 s…

  PublisherDOI

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

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

  articleSenior author
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• <i>JAMA Network Open</i> Peer Reviewers in 2019

  JAMA Network Open · 2020 · 1 citations

  DOI

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

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2026-01-02

  dataset
  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

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Guido W Imbensh-109
• Nicholas Bloomh-106
• Matthew O. Jacksonh-103