Population Studies and Training Center

All News

803 Results based on your selections.
The Washington Post

13 parents share the best reasons to have children

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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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."
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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).
Read Article
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."
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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?
Read Article
The Washington Post

We Need More Research on Guns

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?
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article