Diane Alexander is an Assistant professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Before she was Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Her research is predominantly in health care, studying the economics of the provision of health care services and the actions of health care providers. More broadly, she is interested in the interactions between environmental policies and health, as well as between health care and education.

One strand of Diane’s research is focused on labor market dynamics in the health care industry. She studies roles played by new types of providers in health care delivery, such as retail and urgent care clinics; the impacts of occupational licensing in the health care industry on access to services and health; how payment incentives influence physician decision-making; and understanding the effect of provider-side financial incentives on patient access to treatment. In addition to studying how changing incentives affect provider behavior, she also is interested in how these changes affect patient health.

Another strand of Diane’s work focuses on the interaction of environment and place on health outcomes. She studies the role of residential segregation in explaining persistent racial health disparities. She also is interested in the effect of pollution on health, and is currently studying the effect of excess diesel emissions from the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal on birth outcomes and child health. This project provides new evidence of the scope and damages of the emissions cheating cars; it finds that air pollution from cars is broadly harmful, even at air concentrations conventionally considered to be safe.

Diane Alexander received a B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.

She joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in March 2019.