Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures
Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice.
The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Online Child Safety Ecosystem
Scholars from the Stanford Internet Observatory outline what needs to be done to improve the CyberTipline pipeline as incidents of AI-generated CSAM escalate.
Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief
Using the first global data set of autocratic propaganda, Erin Baggott Carter and Brett Carter examine the intertwined relationship between citizens' beliefs and a the security of a dictator's power.
Compartmental infectious disease (ID) models are often used to evaluate non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccines. Such models rarely separate within-household and community transmission, potentially introducing biases in situations where multiple transmission routes exist. We formulated an approach that incorporates household structure into ID models, extending the work of House and Keeling.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),
September 18, 2023
Extreme air pollution events, like those from wildfires, negatively affect health through physiological responses but may also be salient enough to induce behavioral changes in individuals protecting their own health. The net impacts of these complex tradeoffs are poorly characterized. By joining the near-universe of emergency department visits in California from 2006 to 2017 with spatially and temporally resolved estimates of ambient wildfire smoke, we find total visits respond nonlinearly to increasing wildfire smoke concentrations, but that response differs by cause of visit. Total visits increase at lower concentrations but then decline at higher concentrations, suggesting that populations shift their behaviors following salient smoke periods. Whereas respiratory-related visits steadily increase, visits for accidental injuries and non-respiratory symptoms like stomach pains decline at high smoke concentrations.
Chapter in One Hundred Years of Turkish Foreign Policy (1923-2023), eds. Binnur Özkeçeci-Taner and Sinem Akgül Açıkmeşe. Part of the Global Foreign Policy Studies book series (GFPS).
Economic Development and Cultural Change,
September 15, 2023
Besides increasing knowledge, there is another potential mechanism at work when information is delivered to a treatment group: increasing the salience of existing knowledge. We use data from a randomized controlled trial of a health information campaign to explore the relative importance of this additional mechanism in a real-world environment. The health information campaign addressed the benefits of wearing eyeglasses and provided information meant to address the common misconceptions that contribute to low adoption rates of eyeglasses. In total, our study sample included 931 students with poor vision (mostly myopia), their parents, and their homeroom teachers in 84 primary schools in rural China. We find that the health information campaign was able to successfully increase student ownership and wearing of eyeglasses, relative to a control group. We demonstrate that the campaign had a larger impact when levels of preexisting information among certain subgroups of participants—namely, parents of students—were higher while we simultaneously provided new information to others. This suggests that the interaction between directed attention (i.e., salience) and baseline knowledge is important. We do not, however, find similar increases among teachers or the students themselves and additionally find no impacts on academic outcomes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have limited the federal government’s ability to impose vaccination mandates; some judges have also questioned whether states must grant religious exemptions to vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision in Groff v DeJoy2 concerning Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 raises new questions about the ability of private employers—including health care organizations—to enforce vaccination requirements for employees who have religious objections.
