Douglas MacKay

Designation

Associate Professor, University of North Carolina

Body

Douglas MacKay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the ‘Ethicist in Residence’ at The Transfer Project. His research and teaching interests concern questions at the intersection of justice and public policy. He is currently working on projects concerning the ethics of public policy research; the ethics of health and welfare policy; and the normative dimensions of public policy analysis.

Blogs by author

12 September 2022

Standards of care in policy research

This blog post expands on ideas discussed in an earlier series of blog posts on ethics in social science research. Read the introduction to that series here and read about 3ie's Transparent,…

The Ethics of Payments to Research Participants

28 February 2022

The ethics of payments to research participants

Data collection is often a burdensome and time-consuming activity for research participants, particularly when it involves hours-long surveys. Researchers may wonder if they should pay participants…

Policy equipoise and ethical implementation experiments: Evidence of effectiveness not merely efficacy

16 February 2022

Policy equipoise and ethical implementation experiments: Evidence of effectiveness, not merely efficacy

One ethical concern that researchers and implementation partners confront with the use of experiments to evaluate policy interventions is the withholding of an intervention or policy – e.g. a cash…

How Does Scarcity Inform Ethical Withholding of Treatment?

11 February 2022

How does scarcity inform ethical withholding of treatment?

In order to conduct an impact evaluation, researchers and implementation partners sometimes justify withholding an intervention from some eligible people to form a control group – for example to…