Diane Alexander, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Health Care Management at The Wharton School. 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. Her work has been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, CityLab, Vox, and Scientific American, as well as the Freakonomics podcast.
She has studied the roles played by new types of providers in health care delivery, focusing on retail and urgent care clinics, the role of nurse practitioners and physician assistants in access and health, and how payment incentives influence physician decision-making. Another strand of work focuses on the interaction of environment and place on health outcomes. She has studied the role of residential segregation in explaining persistent racial health disparities, as well as the effect of pollution on health, utilizing the excess diesel emissions from the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal as a natural experiment.
Prior to joining Wharton, Dr. Alexander was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton University.
