The Role of Policy in Achieving Shared, Sustainable Economic Prosperity

Health as a Way of Doing Business. Amy Edmondson, December 6, 2018, Paper, “For too long, the worlds of business and health have been mired in a checkered, sometimes contentious, history. Millions of deaths worldwide can be attributed to risk factors including tobacco use, alcohol and drug misuse, and suboptimal dietary intake linked to commercial products. Media (including social media) coverage about the safety and cost of many consumer goods, both medical (drugs, devices) and nonmedical, reflect profound public concerns. Longstanding societal scrutiny about the role of business in environmental pollution has only increased in the era of global warming.” Link

Poverty in America: New Directions and Debates. Matthew Desmond, Bruce Western, July 2018, Paper, “Reviewing recent research on poverty in the United States, we derive a conceptual framework with three main characteristics. First, poverty is multidimensional, compounding material hardship with human frailty, generational trauma, family and neighborhood violence, and broken institutions. Second, poverty is relational, produced through connections between the truly advantaged and the truly disadvantaged. Third, a component of this conceptual framework is transparently normative, applying empirical research to analyze poverty as a matter of justice, not just economics. Throughout, we discuss conceptual, methodological, and policy-relevant implications of this perspective on the study of extreme disadvantage in America.” Link

Implementation Ups and Downs: Monitoring Attendance to Improve Public Services for the Poor in India. Rema Hanna, July 14, 2018, Paper, “High levels of absenteeism among health workers and teachers have negative effects on citizen health and human capital development. An attendance-monitoring intervention in schools reduced absenteeism and improved test scores, but the impact on health care workers was limited.” Link

A Breath of Bad Air: Cost of the Trump Environmental Agenda May Lead to 80 000 Extra Deaths per Decade. David Cutler, Francesca Dominici, June 12, 2018, Paper, “President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt have pledged to reexamine landmark environmental policies and to repeal regulations. In their view, excessive regulations are harming US industry, and thus reducing regulation will be good for business. As Donald Trump has said, seemingly without irony, “We are going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us. You can’t breathe—you cannot breathe.”” Link

Understanding the micro and macro politics of health: Inequalities, intersectionality & institutions – A research agenda. Jason Beckfield, January 25, 2018, Paper, “This essay brings together intersectionality and institutional approaches to health inequalities, suggesting an integrative analytical framework that accounts for the complexity of the intertwined influence of both individual social positioning and institutional stratification on health. This essay therefore advances the emerging scholarship on the relevance of intersectionality to health inequalities research. We argue that intersectionality provides a strong analytical tool for an integrated understanding of health inequalities beyond the purely socioeconomic by addressing the multiple layers of privilege and disadvantage, including race, migration and ethnicity, gender and sexuality.” Link

Social determinants of health and the International Monetary Fund. S V Subramanian, June 9, 2017, Paper, “Education is considered an important social determinant of health (1, 2). Higher levels of educational attainment appear to be health-enhancing for those who have them (3), and provide intergenerational health benefits for their children (4) as well as their parents (5). Increased knowledge and skills leading to higher wages, as well as psychosocial advantages, such as social standing and control beliefs, are posited as mechanisms that link higher education and improved health (1, 2).” Link

Health and Taxes. David Cutler, October 25, 2016, Paper, “Viewing health care through the lens of a social issue prompts such questions as: What policies would best improve the population’s health? How can report cards be used to improve the quality of surgery? Where are there opportunities for additional disease prevention? The questions here are intricate and detailed. Some of the issues are clinical, and advice from physicians is actively sought and welcomed. For example, no one would develop a pay-for-performance system for surgeons without extensive involvement of the relevant surgical societies.” Link

The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014. Raj Chetty, April 10, 2016, Paper. “Importance: The relationship between income and life expectancy is well established but remains poorly understood.  Objectives” To measure the level, time trend, and geographic variability in the association between income and life expectancy and to identify factors related to small area variation.  Design and Setting: Income data for the US population were obtained from 1.4 billion deidentified tax records between 1999 and 2014. Mortality data were obtained from Social Security Administration death records. These data were used to estimate race- and ethnicity-adjusted life expectancy at 40 years of age by household income percentile, sex, and geographic area, and to evaluate factors associated with differences in life expectancy.” Link

Economic Conditions and Mortality: Evidence from 200 Years of Data. David Cutler, March 29, 2016, Paper. “Using historical mortality data covering over 100 birth cohorts in 32 countries, this paper examines the short- and long- term effects of economic conditions on mortality. We confirm two seemingly contradictory patterns documented before. Poor economic conditions while growing up (from birth to age 25) significantly raise adult mortality. Yet contemporary downturns appear to decrease mortality. In addition we document some new findings. Poor economic conditions in adolescence have the largest adverse effect on adult mortality.” Link

Global Social Protection: Setting the Agenda. Jocelyn Viterna, 2015, Paper, “In todays’ world, more than 220 million people live in a country that is not their own. Many people live transnational lives but the social contract between citizen and state is national. How are people on the move protected and provided for in this new global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of transnational individuals? This paper proposes a new Global Social Protection (GSP) research agenda, summarizing what we know and what we need to do moving forward. What protections exist for migrants, how are the organized across borders, who can access them and who gets left out? .” Link