Gies College of Business professors David Molitor and Julian Reif have been named winners of the 2020 National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation Research award, given each year for outstanding published work in health economics. Molitor and Reif, along with their co-author Damon Jones of the University of Chicago, won the award for their paper “What Do Workplace Wellness Programs Do? Evidence from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study,” which was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, which has garnered international attention in publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Scientific American, is a large, randomized controlled trial of a wellness program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The study examines the effects of financial incentives on participation; investigates who benefits from the programs; estimates the causal effect of workplace wellness on employee health care costs, health behaviors, well-being, and productivity; and tests for peer effects in wellness program participation.

WATCH: David Molitor accepts award on behalf of co-authors Julian Reif and Damon Jones.

The randomized controlled trial showed that financial incentives increased participation in the wellness program, but the program had no effects on health care costs, health behaviors, and productivity. The researchers also found that healthier employees were more likely to participate when offered the program. This finding indicates that evaluating a wellness program by comparing employees who choose to participate to those who don’t can lead to the wrong conclusions.