This report examines how America’s big cities navigated the worst U.S. economic downturn since the Great Depression. It focuses on postrecession revenue as compared with earlier peaks, explores future prospects, and considers cities’ remaining fiscal challenges and their ability to manage future uncertainty while continuing to provide key services to taxpayers.Source: Pew American Cities Project
Changing behaviors is tricky — public health interventions via legislation with strong enforcement mechanisms can be more effective than simple communication campaigns informing consumers about the risks associated with certain behaviors, since translating knowledge into concrete changes in behavior seems to be hard to achieve. Economic mechanisms such as taxes (especially on alcohol and tobacco products), subsidies (such as free condoms), and conditional/unconditional cash transfers are also used to reduce risky behaviors (for example in HIV prevention). Of great interest to policy makers, academics and practitioners, this book assesses the efficiency of those interventions designed to reduce the prevalence of behaviors that endanger health.Source: World Bank
A new report by the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) examines the impact of federal and state policy decisions on community health centers (CHCs) and their ability to continue providing primary care to the nation’s poorest residents. The report, “How Medicaid Expansions and Future Community Health Center Funding Will Shape Capacity to Meet the Nation’s Primary Care Needs,” estimates that under a worst-case scenario, the nation’s health centers would be forced to contract, leaving an estimated 1 million low-income people without access to health care services by the year 2020.Source: Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS)
The longevity of today’s older adults offers greater opportunities for meaningful interactions with children and grandchildren. Yet, the strength of these ties has been tested by changes in the structure and composition of families caused by high rates of cohabitation, childbearing outside of marriage, and divorce. And the rates of disruption are higher for poorer families, so older parents with the fewest resources to share are most likely to be called on for help.Source: Brown University
Past research demonstrates that free time is an important resource for political participation. We investigate whether two central drains on citizens’ daily time—working and commuting—impact their level of political participation. The prevailing “resources” model offers a quantity-focused view where additional time spent working or commuting reduces free time and should each separately decrease participation. We contrast this view to a “commuter’s strain” hypothesis, which emphasizes time spent in transit as a psychologically onerous burden over and above the workday. Using national survey data, we find that time spent working has no effect on participation, while commuting significantly decreases participation. We incorporate this finding into a comprehensive model of the “daily grind,” which factors in both socioeconomic status and political interest. Our analysis demonstrates that commuting leads to the greatest loss in political interest for low-income Americans, and that this loss serves as a main mechanism through which commuting erodes political participation.Source: American Politics Research
The vast majority or workers say that the benefits package an employer offers―especially health insurance―is important to their decision to accept or reject a job, but a quarter are not satisfied with them, according to a new survey.Source: EBRI
More than three-quarters of employees state that the benefits package an employer offers prospective employees is extremely (33 percent) or very (45 percent) important in their decision to accept or reject a job, according to the 2013 Health and Voluntary Workplace Benefits Survey (WBS), by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and Greenwald and Associates.
Mobile phone-based psychological interventions enable real time self-monitoring and self-management, and large-scale dissemination. However, few studies have focussed on mild-to-moderate symptoms where public health need is greatest, and none have targeted work and social functioning. This study reports outcomes of a CONSORT-compliant randomised controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the efficacy of myCompass, a self-guided psychological treatment delivered via mobile phone and computer, designed to reduce mild-to-moderate depression, anxiety and stress, and improve work and social functioning.
We obtained data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System database from 2005 to 2010 on every crash that resulted in at least one fatality within 30 days occurring on public roads in the U.S. Following the definition used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, we identified distracted driving based on whether police investigators determined that a driver had been using a technological device, including a cell phone, onboard navigation system, computer, fax machine, two-way radio, or head-up display, or had been engaged in inattentive or careless activities.Source: Public Health Reports
Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community. Using agent-based modeling to simulate neighborhoods and neighborhood social network formation, we explore whether the community-diversity dialectic emerges from two principles of relationship formation: homophily and proximity. The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community. Based on these results, we conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to create neighborhoods that simultaneously foster respect for diversity and sense of community.Source: Am J Community Psychol. 2013 Nov 6. [Epub ahead of print]- via PUBMed
Foundation support for media is growing at nearly four times the rate of domestic giving in other areas, with $1.86 billion invested between 2009-2011, according to a report released today. The report, Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States, is a collaboration among the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and provides the most comprehensive view to date of philanthropy’s role in the media funding landscape.Source: Foundation Center
Answering a demand for data in this area, the report provides a chronological view of media-related funding across organization types and areas of focus, providing a benchmark for further progress. The report is part of a larger project that includes an interactive data visualization tool and knowledge center that open up the findings for further analysis.
Health care access, affordability, and quality are problems all around the world and large numbers of individuals do not receive the quality care that they need. Mobile technology offers ways to help with these challenges. Through mobile health applications, sensors, medical devices, and remote patient monitoring products, there are avenues through which health care delivery can be improved. These technologies can help lower costs by facilitating the delivery of care, and connecting people to their health care providers. Applications allow both patients and providers to have access to reference materials, lab tests, and medical records using mobile devices.Source: Brookings Institution
This report summarizes research conducted primarily over the past 10 years on how families’ involvement in children’s learning and development through activities at home and at school affects the literacy, mathematics, and social-emotional skills of children ages 3 to 8. A total of 95 studies of family involvement are reviewed. These include both descriptive, nonintervention studies of the actions families take at home and at school and intervention studies of practices that guide families to conduct activities that strengthen young children’s literacy and math learning.Source: MDRC
This paper explores a novel mechanism of gender identity formation. Specifically, we explore how the work behavior of a teenager's own mother, as well as that of her friends' mothers, affect her work decisions in adulthood. The first mechanism is commonly included in economic models. The second, which in social psychology is also emphasized as an important factor in gender identity formation, has so far been overlooked. Accordingly, our key theoretical innovation is how the utility function is modeled. It is assumed that an adult woman's work decisions are influenced by her own mother's choices as well as her friends' mothers' choices when she was a teenager, and the interaction between the two. The empirical salience of this behavioral model is tested using a network model specification together with the longitudinal structure of the AddHealth data set. We find that both intergenerational channels positively affect a woman's work hours in adulthood, but the cross effect is negative, indicating the existence of cultural substitutability. That is, the mother's role model effect is larger the more distant she is (in terms of working hours) from the friends' mothers.Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests – elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed. Yet each of the three components of the standard optimization problem in political economy – preferences, constraints, and choice variables – rely on an implicit set of ideas. Once the manner in which ideas enter these frameworks is made explicit, a much richer and more convincing set of results can be obtained. In particular, new ideas about policy—or policy entrepreneurship—can exert an independent effect on equilibrium outcomes even in the absence of changes in the configuration of political power.Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
Academics are increasingly being urged to blog in order to expand their audiences, create networks and to learn to write in more reader friendly style. This paper holds this advocacy up to empirical scrutiny. A content analysis of 100 academic blogs suggests that academics most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information and provide advice; the intended audience for this work is other higher education staff. We contend that academic blogging may constitute a community of practice in which a hybrid public/private academic operates in a ‘gift economy’. We note however that academic blogging is increasingly of interest to institutions and this may challenge some of the current practices we have recorded. We conclude that there is still much to learn about academic blogging practices.Source: Studies in Higher Education
The Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange is published by the Institute of International Education, the leading not-for-profit educational and cultural exchange organization in the United States. IIE has conducted an annual statistical survey of campuses regarding the international students in the United States since 1919, and with support from the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs since the early 1970s. The census is based on a survey of approximately 3,000 accredited U.S. institutions. Open Doors also conducts and reports on separate surveys on U.S. students studying abroad for academic credit (since 1985), and on international scholars at U.S. universities and international students enrolled in pre-academic Intensive English Programs.Source: Institute of International Education
America’s youngest children—12 million infants and toddlers—are the leading edge of a demographic transformation in the U.S. They herald a nation more diverse with respect to race/ethnicity, country of origin, language, and family type than at any time in our recent history. They are surrounded by, and engaged with, new technology. Most of our youngest Americans, according to their parents, have at least some of the important characteristics associated with optimal development.Source: Child Trends and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation
At the same time, they are a generation characterized by marked inequities, with disturbing proportions facing severe disadvantage that imposes both immediate and lasting threats to well-being. Significant numbers are born into families without the human and financial resources to pro- mote their development; disparities by race and Hispanic origin persist; public policy responses have been slow to materialize and, where they exist, often serve only a fraction of the children in need.
Narcissism is characterized by traits such as dominance, self-confidence, a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and low empathy. There is growing evidence that individuals with these characteristics often emerge as leaders, and that narcissistic CEOs may make more impulsive and risky decisions. We suggest that these tendencies may also affect how compensation is allocated among top management teams. Using employee ratings of personality for the CEOs of 32 prominent high-technology firms, we investigate whether more narcissistic CEOs have compensation packages that are systematically different from their less narcissistic peers, and specifically whether these differences increase the longer the CEO stays with the firm. As predicted, we find that more narcissistic CEOs who have been with their firm longer receive more total direct compensation (salary, bonus, and stock options), have more money in their total shareholdings, and have larger discrepancies between their own (higher) compensation and the other members of their team.Source: Working Paper Series, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UC Berkeley [via eScholarship Repository]
Although depression is highly treatable, especially in early stages, only half of women are screened for maternal depression, and only a minority receive treatment. Untreated depression puts women and children at risk, as pregnant women with depression are 3.4 times more likely than baseline women to deliver preterm, and children of depressed mothers also demonstrate high lifetime medical spending, because maternal depression can impact child development. Maternal depression disproportionately impacts low-income women, as evidenced by their overrepresentation among women suffering from depression overall.Source: Policy Briefs, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA [via eScholarship Repository]
This study examines the correlation between childhood poverty and its influence on adulthood wage distribution, where childhood poverty refers to experience of poverty or poor family background during one's childhood. With the data from Korean Labor Income Panel Study, KLIPS, quantile regression technique and decomposition method are conducted to identify and decompose the wage gap between low (poor) and middle class income group along the whole current wage distribution, based on a simulated counterfactual distribution. The results show that, those who had been less fortunate during their childhood likely had less opportunity to gain labor market favored characteristics such as a higher level of education, and even earn lower returns to their labor market characteristics in the current labor market. This leads to a discount of about fifteen percentages points off of the wage on average in total for those with underprivileged backgrounds during childhood compared to those with the middle class background, and that disadvantage is observed heterogeneously, greater at the lower quantiles than the higher quantiles of the current wage distribution. Then this research contributes to the literature by providing a partial understanding of poverty in Korea and its possible causes, in particular, in form of poor family background or childhood poverty, with which the implication of intergenerational effect issue is considered.Source: Institute for the Study of Labor
Previous empirical work on corruption has generally been cross-country in nature and focused on utilizing country-level corruption ratings. By using micro-level data for over 20 European countries that directly measure individual characteristics, corruption experiences, gender roles, trust and values to examine the determinants of corruption, this paper goes beyond the search for associations between various macro factors and perceptions of corruption that is prevalent in the economic literature. One focus of the paper is on how cultural norms such as gender roles and risk preferences influence corruption and whether there are gender differences in the determinants of corruption. In addition, this paper also seeks to determine if there are contagion effects in corruption at the micro level. Using a seemingly unrelated probit approach, this paper provides empirical estimates of how past experiences with corruption affects both how bribery is viewed and the actual act of offering a bribe.Source: Institute for the Study of Labor
Every person aspires to a good life. But what does “a good or a better life” mean? The second edition of How’s Life? paints a comprehensive picture of well-being in OECD countries and other major economies, by looking at people’s material living conditions and quality of life across the population. In addition, the report contains in-depth studies of four key cross-cutting issues in well-being that are particularly relevant: how has well-being evolved during the global economic and financial crisis?; how big are gender differences in well-being?; how can we assess well-being in the workplace?; and how to define and measure the sustainability of well-being over time?Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
This analysis examined ED visits made by persons aged 65 and over in 2009–2010 and identified a number of differences by age. The ED visit rate and the percentage of ED visits made by nursing home residents, patients arriving by ambulance, and patients admitted to the hospital increased with age. The percentage of injury-related ED visits was highest among persons aged 85 and over, and the percentage of visits caused by a fall increased with age. As the proportion of older individuals in the United States continues to rise, the recognition of age differences in the utilization and provision of ED services among this population will be important.Data Source info:
Data for this analysis are from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), an annual, nationally representative survey of nonfederal, general, and short-stay hospitals. NHAMCS is conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics and provides data on the utilization and provision of ambulatory care services in hospital emergency and outpatient departmentsSource: Center for Disease Control and Prevention
This report discusses the effects of the FY2014 government shutdown on the economy. It also reviews third-party estimates of the effects of the shutdown on the economy, which predicted a reduction in gross domestic product (GDP) growth of at least 0.1 percentage points for each week of the shutdown, with a cumulative effect of up to 0.6 percentage points in the fourth quarter of 2013. The Congressional Research Service does not plan to provide an independent estimate of the economic impact of the shutdown.Source: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress [via Secrecy News]
On Facebook, the largest social media platform, news is a common but incidental experience, according to an initiative of Pew Research Center in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Overall, about half of adult Facebook users, 47%, “ever” get news there. That amounts to 30% of the population.
Most U.S. adults do not go to Facebook seeking news out, the nationally representative online survey of 5,173 adults finds. Instead, the vast majority of Facebook news consumers, 78%, get news when they are on Facebook for other reasons. And just 4% say it is the most important way they get news. As one respondent summed it up, “I believe Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it.”Source: Pew Research Journalism Project
The consequences of gangs — and the burden they place on the law enforcement and public health systems in our communities — are significant. People who work in the fields of public health and public safety know that efforts to address the problem after kids have already joined gangs are not enough. To realize a significant and lasting reduction in youth gang activity, we must prevent young people from joining gangs in the first place.Source: National Institute of Justice (U.S.A.)
