Mario Macis

I am an applied economist whose scholarship spans health economics, labor economics, development economics, and market design.

Much of my work examines how incentives, institutions, information, trust, social norms, and moral values shape decisions in domains with substantial individual and societal consequences, including health care, biomedical research, prosocial behavior, and labor markets. I am especially interested in people’s support for markets and market-based solutions to social problems, their attitudes toward regulation and new technologies, and the consequences of these views for economic and social welfare.

Methodologically, my work combines field experiments, survey experiments, laboratory experiments, administrative and survey data analysis, and interdisciplinary conceptual work. Over the long term, I aim to contribute rigorous empirical and conceptual evidence on how markets, policies, and institutions can be designed to promote socially valuable behavior, improve health and welfare, and align innovation and policy with ethical principles and public values.

Although my research is primarily in economics, much of it is interdisciplinary. I have published in leading academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, Management Science, Sociological Science, Science, and JAMA Internal Medicine. My research has been mentioned in prominent media outlets including The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Financial Times.

A central strand of my research studies how incentives, social norms, and institutions can promote socially valuable behavior. I have conducted field- and survey-based experimental studies on economic incentives and social norms in blood donation, a setting where individual decisions have direct consequences for public health. I have also studied attitudes toward compensation for organ donors and policies to reduce barriers to living kidney donation, as well as people’s reactions to price surges and price controls, especially in emergencies.

Another strand of my work examines labor markets, organizations, and health systems. I have studied the effects of firms' exporting on workers’ wages, the impact of female CEOs on gender wage inequality, the effect of unemployment benefits on job reallocation, the adoption of efficient management practices in health care, and the effects of incentivized peer referrals on the detection of infectious diseases.

Currently, I am studying the determinants and consequences of Americans' trust — and lack of trust — in the health care system, attitudes toward human enhancement technologies and AI, and the determinants of decision-making at the end of life. I am also exploring market design solutions for ethical and efficient biobanking and contributing to debates on how biomedical research can better align with patient engagement, fairness, and trust. Together, these projects examine how markets, policies, and institutions can promote welfare-enhancing solutions that are consistent with public values and ethical standards in an increasingly technology-driven world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-authored studies on expectations about the duration of lockdowns and people’s compliance, reactions to price surges of essential goods, the effect of social networks on the adoption of preventive behaviors, and compliance with social distancing measures. I also co-organized interdisciplinary webinars and a joint JHU-LSE online conference on behavioral economics and COVID-19.

I teach courses in microeconomics, behavioral economics, strategic human capital, health economics, and applied behavioral strategy for organizational and societal impact.

I enjoy organizing and moderating webinars on current issues in health markets and policy.

I have been a consultant for the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, the National Marrow Donor Program, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Health Organization.

I recently served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on a fairer, more equitable, cost-effective, and transparent system of donor organ procurement, allocation, and distribution. The committee released a report, available here. I also contributed to a United Nations report on the social and economic impact of the Zika virus.

I am a member of the Editorial Board of the Italian Economic Journal.

I write op-eds for La Nuova Sardegna, articles for ECO, mainly on the economics of health and health care, and for La Voce in Italian. I have also contributed to ProMarket at the University of Chicago Stigler Center, VoxDev, and VoxEU.

Before joining Johns Hopkins, I was a faculty member at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. I received my PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and my Laurea in Economics and Social Disciplines from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.