Jessica Cohen

Assistant Professor of Global Health

Department of Global Health and Population

Building 1, Room 1209
665 Huntington Ave
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
cohenj@hsph.harvard.edu

Bio and Current Research

Dr. Jessica Lee Cohen is Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Faculty Affiliate at the Harvard Center for International Development and Malaria Technical Adviser with the Clinton Health Access Initiative. She is also the co-founder of TAMTAM Africa, Inc. (Together Against Malaria), an NGO operating in East Africa since 2003 working on malaria prevention among pregnant women. Her current research applies the methods of program design, randomized trials, and impact evaluation to maternal and child health programs and policies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Cohen is co-editor (with William Easterly) of the book “What Works in Development?: Thinking Big and Thinking Small.” She also has forthcoming research on sustainable financing for public health programs and financing vehicles to reduce aid volatility.

She is currently working on a number of field trials in Africa related to appropriate treatment for malaria, technology adoption, messaging and behavior change and pharmaceutical supply chains.

Dr. Cohen’s work has been referenced in major national and international publications, including the The Economist, the Boston Globe, New York Times and Nature. She has advised the government of Zanzibar on its malaria control program and the Canadian International Development Agency on its child survival programs.

Dr. Cohen received her bachelor’s degree in economics from Wesleyan University and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at MIT, where she received her doctorate in economics.

Published/Forthcoming

Free Distribution of Cost-Sharing? Evidence from a Randomized Malaria Prevention Experiment (with Pascaline Dupas) [PDF] [Web Appendix] Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(1), pp. 1-45, February 2010.

What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small (with William Easterly) Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009. [Introduction by Cohen and Easterly] [Link to the book]

The Costs and Feasibility of Malaria Elimination (with Oliver Sabot et al.), Lancet, 376(9752), pp. 1604-1615, 2010. [Link to PubMed]

A Framework for Assessing the Feasibility of Malaria Elimination (with Bruno Moonen et al.), Malaria Journal, 9: 322, 2010. [Link to Full Text]

Instinct and Choice: The Implications of Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology for Policy Analysis (with William Dickens), in Nature and Nurture: The Complex Interplay of Genetic and Environmental Influences on Human Behavior, C. G. Coll, E. Bearer, and R. Lerner, eds. Erlbaum, 2004. [PDF] [Link to the Book]

A Foundation for Behavioral Economics (with William Dickens), American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 92(2), May, 2002. [PDF]

Have the New Human Resource Management Practices Lowered the Unemployment Rate? (with William Dickens and Adam Posen), in The Roaring Nineties: Can Full Employment be Sustained? A. Krueger and R. Solow, eds. Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002. [PDF] [Link to the Book]