Mario Macis

I am an applied economist, and my research focuses on the ways that economic incentives interact with psychological and social factors to influence individual behavior and outcomes relevant to organizations and public policy. I am particularly interested in the role of incentives in shaping pro-social behavior, the determinants of people's attitudes towards morally sensitive exchanges, and the factors that influence people's support for markets and market-based solutions to social problems. I conducted field- and survey-based experimental studies to examine the effect of economic incentives on blood donation, attitudes about providing compensation to organ donors, and people's reactions to price surges and price controls.

More broadly, I am interested in health, development, labor, and organizational economics. I studied the effects of incentivized peer referrals to improve the detection of infectious diseases, the adoption of efficient management practices in health care, the effect of firms' exporting on workers’ wages, the impact of female CEOs on gender wage inequality, and the effect of unemployment benefits on job reallocation.

** Research on the COVID-19 pandemic response **: I co-authored studies on expectations about the duration of lockdowns and people’s compliance, people’s reactions to price surges of essential goods, and the effect of social networks on the adoption of preventative behaviors, and compliance with social distancing measures . I also co-organized inter-disciplinary webinars and a joint JHU-LSE online conference on behavioral economics and covid-19 to foster conversations and exchanges of ideas and contribute to informing policymakers.

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Much of my work has implications for organizational and public policy. I have been a consultant for the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, the National Marrow Donor Program, and the United Nations Development Program.

I recently served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee on A Fairier and 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.

Occasionally, I write Op-eds for La Nuova Sardegna and policy pieces for La Voce (in Italian).

Before joining 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, Department of Economics.