Mario Macis

I am an applied economist whose research examines how markets, policies, and institutions shape behavior in domains where individual decisions have large social consequences. My scholarship spans health economics, labor economics, development economics, behavioral economics, and market design, with a particular focus on settings in which incentives interact with trust, information, social norms, moral values, and institutional legitimacy.

A unifying theme of my work is that many important economic and social problems cannot be understood through prices and incentives alone. In areas such as health care, biomedical research, prosocial behavior, labor markets, and the adoption of new technologies, people’s decisions are also shaped by beliefs about fairness, trustworthiness, ethical acceptability, social meaning, and the legitimacy of institutions. My research studies how these forces affect behavior, how they shape public support for markets and regulation, and how they can inform the design of policies and institutions that improve welfare while remaining aligned with public values.

Methodologically, my work combines field experiments, survey experiments, laboratory experiments, administrative and survey data analysis, and interdisciplinary conceptual work. Across these approaches, I aim to produce rigorous empirical and conceptual evidence on how markets and institutions can be designed to promote socially valuable behavior, improve health and welfare, and support innovation in ways that are ethical, equitable, and publicly legitimate.

A central strand of my research examines prosocial health behaviors and morally sensitive markets. 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. This work asks when incentives can promote socially valuable behavior, when they may conflict with moral or social norms, and how policy design can balance efficiency, equity, and ethical acceptability.

Much of my research focuses on health-related decisions and institutions. I have studied how incentives, information, and social influence affect the uptake of health services, including HIV testing, tuberculosis screening, COVID-19 preventive behaviors, and eye exams among low-income populations. I have also studied Americans' trust — and lack of trust — in the health care system, including how trust and mistrust vary across health care actors and how trust relates to care-seeking and vaccination. This work reflects a broader interest in how health systems can become more trustworthy and how trust shapes health behavior and outcomes.

Another strand of my work studies labor markets, organizations, and health systems. I have examined 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 role of peer referrals and social networks in detecting infectious diseases. These projects share an interest in how institutional environments and organizational practices shape behavior, productivity, equity, and access.

My current research extends these themes to several emerging areas. I am studying the determinants and consequences of trust in health care, attitudes toward human enhancement technologies and AI, the determinants of decision-making at the end of life, and market design approaches for ethical and efficient biobanking. I am also contributing to debates on how biomedical research can better align with patient engagement, fairness, privacy, and trust. Together, these projects examine how institutions can support welfare-enhancing innovation while maintaining public values and ethical standards in an increasingly technology-driven world.

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.

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 Johns Hopkins University–London School of Economics 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.