Awardee | Harvard Kennedy School Professor Marcella Alsan and co-author Marianne Wanamaker of the University of Tennesee accepted the 27th Kenneth J. Arrow Award for best paper in health economics at this week's Allied Social Sciences Association meetings in San Diego. The award, given by International Health Economics Association, recognized their paper, "Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2018.
"The Arrow Award Committee is proud to acknowledge the authors of this innovative and informative paper, which examines the extent to which the infamous Tuskegee Study of untreated syphilis in black males reduced trust in the medical system and ultimately impeded the progress in reducing mortality for this group...The results provide robust evidence that disclosure of the Tuskegee Study undermined trust in the medical system with the strongest effects for those black males for whom the study was most salient. This led to reductions in the use of medical care and increases in mortality for the most affected group. Specifically, the estimates imply that life expectancy for 45-year old black men fell by up to 1.5 years, an amount sufficient to explain approximately one-third of the racial gap in life expectancy in 1980. We congratulate the authors on the publication of this important paper."
