Voluntary Accreditation and Healthcare Quality: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in U.S. Jails

We gratefully acknowledge funding from JPAL North America, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Preparedness and Treatment Equity Coalition, Arnold Ventures, and the Malcolm Wiener Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. We thank seminar participants at NBER Law and Economics, NBER Crime, NBER Economics of Health, Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, Vancouver School of Economics, UCLA Anderson, MIT Economics, Minnesota Department of Management and Budget, Boston University Law School, Princeton, Stanford, MIT Organizational Economics and Dartmouth. We thank the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC), especially Chief Executive Officer Deborah Ross, Vice President of Accreditation Amy Panagopoulos, and Vice President of Program Development Rich Forbus. We also thank jail custody and health staff, incarcerated individuals, and county sheriffs for their time and participation. We thank Jim Martin, Meghan Beal, Dr. Cara Buchanan Muñoz, George Hutchins, and Dr. Nicholos Joseph for sharing their expertise. This work would not have been possible without the effort of our dedicated project coordinators: Tasfia Jahangir and Nadia Huffman. Emily Deng, Alessandro Perga, Miguel Purroy, Qing Liu, Shipra Karan, Xingyou Ye, Vanessa Jia, Nada Shalash, Nick Shankar, and Lukas Leister provided excellent research assistance. Finally, we thank the numerous college, law, public policy, and medical students who worked on the project: James Jolin, Lucy Tu, Gwen Byrne, Aisha Oshilaja, Pierre Jolin, Josh Alpert, Daniel Tochimani-Hernandez, Farrah Kalach, Janine Robredo, Sophia Fend, Bolin Shen, Yedith Ortiz, Emily Shah, Susan Takang, Kate De Groote, Worthy Cho, Israa Alzami, Anne Deng, Christine Smith, Aydin Alsan, Achele Agada, Cana Nakase, Sarah Kliment, Kathryn Li, Kaitlyn Ham, Tatheer Adnan, Anita Onyimah, Folukemi Olufidipe, Meisui Liu, Phoebe Canagarajah, Lea Han, Allie Oh, Louis Lin, Jennifer Ding, Zach Channen, Nik Zappia, Fiona Doyle, Christian Carson, Drew Lane, Jack Haney, Haley Dougherty, Ashil Jhaveri, Abigail Sassoon-Dondero, and Isaac Harris. Angelique Aquatella, Caroline Hoxby, and Karine Van Der Straeten provided helpful feedback. The experiment was registered on the AEA RCT registry (RCT ID: AEARCTR-0007516). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry

• January 10, 2025
• January 17, 2025
• September 11, 2025
• May 1, 2026