2021

Low rates of exclusive breastfeeding and exposure to water-borne contaminants due to inadequate sanitation, water treatment, and hygiene contribute to high levels of infant morbidity and mortality in low-income countries. This pilot leverages detailed micro-data from over 100,000 households in Punjab, Pakistan in combination with a quasi-experimental change in Community Health Worker (CHW)  coverage to generate high-quality evidence on the impact of CHW-based community health work and its interaction with a key environmental health threat: poor water quality due to inadequate sanitation.

Immigrants in the U.S. have become increasingly dispersed across suburban areas and new destination areas, away from concentrated ethnic neighborhoods.

While there is substantial suggestive evidence that youth criminal involvement and/or violent death correlates with poor outcomes for families, there is a significant gap in knowledge regarding its spillover effects over siblings and school peers, particularly in the context of North Carolina and Durham. A multi-pronged evaluation of the causes and consequences of these dimensions on dimensions associated with health, education and child development more generally is essential for informing public policy targeting disadvantaged populations within the state and local communities.

Neuroscientific research on decision making and aging has focused almost exclusively on monetary incentives. Despite evidence for intact processing of and motivation by monetary gains in old age, preserved function does not extend to learning-based decision making where these incentives must be applied. Here older adults learn more slowly from monetary gains and losses compared to younger adults.

This pilot will assess the use of data from a commercial consumer database on all households in the U.S. to construct reliable measures of the volatility of household income. If successful, the resulting data will be used to assess the relationships between income volatility and mortality in the U.S. and how that relationship varies by race/ethnicity, age and gender of heads of households in the U.S. Study of the latter relationship has been hampered by the lack of availability of samples of households in the U.S.

It is estimated that about 38% of children experience abuse and/or neglect, with the highest rates of maltreatment reported during early childhood. Experiences of child abuse and neglect are linked to poor developmental, behavioral, and health outcomes throughout the life course.