Concerns over school closures in Rhode Island are being sped up by a rapid drop in public school students. The state has 17,000 fewer students enrolled in public schools than it did in 1999.

Critics of freeway expansion projects cite the need to combat climate change and air pollution, the legacy of displacing and polluting communities of color, and research that shows that expanding freeways doesn’t alleviate traffic congestion.

Societal diversity fosters creativity and cultural cross-pollination, but can also hinder social cohension. This column uses data on oral traditions and folkloric motifs across the world to examine the impact of the prehistoric migration of humans out of Africa on cultural diversity.

Is the trauma of displacement enduring? What is its impact – on the economy, on electoral behavior, on art – even decades later? How is a society affected when it suddenly needs to take in a large number of refugees?

About 46% of Americans have hypertension, among whom more than 75% do not have it under control. “Hypertension is a primary cause of cardiovascular disease, which is the leading killer in the United States and worldwide,” says Eric B. Loucks, PhD.

To narrow the nation’s deeply entrenched health disparities, a permanent entity with regulatory powers should be created by the president to oversee health equity efforts across the entire federal government, says a report issued by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Effective HIV prevention and treatment are widely available, but services are underused and underdelivered. Behavioural economics offers insights into why this is and shows us cost-effective interventions to change behaviours.

In his recently published paper, PSTC economist Stelios Michalopoulos investigates why Christian populations experience higher rates of educational mobility throughout Africa.

On July 6, 2023, members of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) community gathered in the Amphitheater “Leonidas Zervas” of the National Research Foundation in Athens to award an Honorary Doctorate of the Department of Economics, of the School of Economics, to Professor Oded Galor.

Medicaid is an essential source of maternal and postpartum care for low-income Americans, covering 42% of births in the U.S. But many immigrants don’t have access to this coverage, making them more vulnerable to maternal health problems, as highlighted by a new study of nearly 73,000 postpartum people across 19 states and New York City between 2012 and 2019.

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent. A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes.

Dire warnings of teacher shortages are nothing new, especially during the pandemic, and are sometimes overblown. But a confluence of warning signs suggest that the country is at a post-pandemic inflection point.

It’s not surprising that in places where food is scarce, obesity serves as a significant marker of wealth. But what the new study points out is that in poor countries, information is also scarce. And in those situations, loan officers use whatever bits of evidence they can find to help make critical economic decisions.

Renowned economist and Nobel candidate Oded Galor spoke with RTL ahead of an event at Neumünster Abbey in late June to discuss his bestseller 'The Journey of Humanity.'

PSTC researcher Anna Aizer and her colleagues identify heightened wartime labor demand as source of increased economic opportunity for Black families.

The nation’s median age reached 38.9 in 2022, according to new Census data; that’s the highest it has ever been.

David Kertzer will be a featured speaker at The Mount's 2023 Summer Lecture series. Now in its 30th year, the annual 8-part series brings leading biographers and historians to the Berkshires.

"It's clear from national data that there was a large decline in student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic," says study co-author Emily Oster.

Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform’s interim director will now lead the institute on a permanent basis.

PSTC researchers are creating a new national database to record the triumphs of immigrant graduate students and highlight the remaining barriers to educational equity.

For the lucky among us who have formed connections with a teacher, a school counselor or a coach, their value can seem immeasurable. That has not deterred a trio of researchers from trying to quantify that influence.

Over the last three generations, Christian children in Africa have surpassed their parents’ level of education at a much higher rate than Muslim and traditionalist children there have, research shows.

Minnesota children spend fewer hours and days in the classroom than their peers nationwide. Among states with mandated instructional time, only Colorado requires fewer days than Minnesota, according to the Education Commission of the States.

On Thursday, May 18, members of the PSTC community gathered to celebrate the graduation of 10 PSTC trainees who will receive PhDs from the Brown University Graduate School this month.

Katherine Mason offers commentary on the legacy of Jiang Yanyong.

In 2021, Rhode Island became the first state in the nation to authorize centers for people to consume illegal drugs under supervision, and now lessons learned in the Ocean State could help pave the way for similar harm-reduction efforts elsewhere.

In honor of Mother's Day, Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg shares her favorite anecdotes from parenting writers and experts, including one from PSTC economist Emily Oster.

A $3.1 million NIH grant supports Professor Blair T. Johnson and collaborators from Brown University in analyzing the effectiveness of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) interventions.

If you are looking for a silver lining from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's this sad short-lived truth, Megan Ranney, MD, deputy dean at Providence, R.I.-based Brown University School of Public Health, told Becker's: "During the pandemic there were no school or workplace shootings."

Why are some countries rich and some poor? A leading economist finds the answer in the interactions of economies with the rest of the world, through trade, capital flows, and—notably—migration.

A recent survey of 1,586 women conducted by Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA) in partnership with YouGov, an international research organization, and economist Emily Oster found only 26 percent of respondents feel good about their retirement savings.

Behavioral science may have a role to play in making AI an aid, not a threat, to humanity.

The most recent undertaking of the Urban Transition Historical GIS Project, the Century Project seeks to create a geographical database of historically segregated urban communities.

Many days, it feels impossible to envision an America without rampant gun violence. Living in anticipation of when and where the next shooter will walk into a crowd and open fire is an all too familiar anxiety for most citizens.

The past several weeks have seen somewhat widespread discussion of a truly upsetting trend in adolescent and teen mental health. In the most recent CDC data, 40 percent of high school students indicated that during the previous year they had experienced sadness severe enough that it impeded their ability to do their normal activities for at least two weeks.

Climate change disasters’ impact on population health, health disparities, and the national health care delivery infrastructure are subjects of too little academic research at a time when policymakers’ need for such data has never been greater. That’s according to five top academic research experts convened in a virtual seminar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI).

The Providence Public School District is still struggling to attract enough applicants and retain them, with interest limited in jobs serving high-needs students, a new Brown University report shows.

Kate Mason — a Brown University anthropology professor who co-founded the Pandemic Journaling Project with Sarah Willen, a University of Connecticut anthropology professor — said the writings, submitted anonymously, had two things in common: "a lot of deep loneliness" and "a lot of fear and uncertainty."

As schools reckon with the toll of the pandemic, leaders across the country have begun to test out a strategy they hope will help students catch up on missed learning: tutoring.

When mothers weigh the choice to leave the workforce, childcare costs are the immediate concern, says PSTC Economist Emily Oster, That makes sense, but it doesn't mean parents considering a break from the workforce shouldn't also consider longer-term factors as well.

Created by the Pandemic Journaling Project, this visual installation offers visitors a democratic history of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sociologist Michael J. White offers context to WalletHub's recent comparison of more than 500 of the largest U.S. cities across three key indicators of ethnic diversity.

Air travel is essential to connecting firm workers who reside in different locations by effectively and efficiently shrinking the geographic distance between them. But beyond merely bridging this physical gap, can it also play a role in helping global organizations overcome cultural, temporal and other dimensions of distance and contribute to positive innovation outcomes?

Some researchers have created databases to describe mass shooters. But this is descriptive data, not a predictive model. What is it about a school kid, a lonely elderly man, or a young adult that makes them shoot themselves or someone else? Are there environmental signals that we can act on? Are they long term, or in the moment? How do we identify these signs, whether in social media or personal interactions, without violating privacy rights and without bias?

News headlines often give the impression of teacher shortages as national and state level crises, but if policymakers want to ensure classrooms are adequately staffed, they need to examine and address labor market conditions more locally, all the way down to the school level.

Professor Linford Fisher’s team of research assistants has been hunting through letters, diaries, court papers, newspapers, and other records, searching for references to Indigenous people who were enslaved or forced into other positions of servitude.

Racism operates at the interpersonal, cultural, and structural levels, marginalizing or excluding minoritized racial and ethnic groups from the social, economic, and political resources and opportunities that represent important social determinants of health—and exposing these groups to higher levels of social, economic, environmental, and psychosocial harms throughout the life course.

PSTC Researcher David Savitz comments on new study finding that Covid-19 infection while pregnant can increase the risk of death by seven times.