In addition to the most pressing issues of the day, scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies focus their research on many regions of the world, from Beijing to Brazil.
Research Spotlight
The Ripple Effects of China’s College Expansion on American Universities
Researchers at SCCEI trace how China’s unprecedented expansion of higher education has impacted U.S. graduate education and local economies surrounding college towns.
While Nayib Bukele's style of authoritarianism may have some successes on paper, Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros argue that the regime is headed for a reckoning.
Time for Iran to Make a No-enrichment Nuclear Deal
The time has come for Iran’s leaders to reconsider their past intransigent, deceptive posture and instead pursue a nuclear power program that will benefit the Iranian people, write Abbas Milani and Siegfried Hecker.
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.
This study examines the level and equity of household education spending in China using representative microdata. The findings reveal that education expenditure constitutes a substantial portion of household income, averaging around 17.1%. Moreover, there is an inverse relationship between household income and the fraction of income spent on education, with the top quartile spending 10.6% of their income on education, while the bottom quartile spends a staggering 56.8%. Regression analysis indicates an income elasticity of 0.306, implying that education is a necessity good in China. These results underscore the excessive financial burden imposed by education expenditure, particularly on families in the lower income bracket. To promote equal opportunities and achieve broad, long-term economic benefits, it is imperative to implement new public policies in China that improve the affordability of education for a broader segment of the population.
