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.
Objective: To develop a measure for fair inclusion in pivotal trials by assessing transparency and representation of enrolled women, older adults (aged 65 years and older), and racially and ethnically minoritized patients.
Williamsburg, VA: AidData at William & Mary,
January 5, 2023
The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home. Are digital technology transfers from Huawei, China’s leading information technology company, enabling recipient governments to expand their digital surveillance operations and engage in more targeted repression against dissidents?
Federal courts in Texas are fast becoming known as the graveyards of U.S. health policies.1 Decisions concerning a range of statutes, from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, have chipped away at federal powers to protect the public’s health. The latest case in this series, Braidwood Management Inc. v. Becerra,2 targets the ACA’s use of U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations as a basis for mandating insurance coverage for preventive care. The Braidwood decision not only destabilizes efforts to ensure access to essential insurance benefits but also illustrates an emerging strategy among litigants with antiregulatory agendas: wielding heretofore sleepy doctrines of administrative and constitutional law to undercut health initiatives.
In this cross-sectional study of nearly 800,000 U.S. participants aged 5 to 17 years with family income under 200% of the federal poverty threshold, researchers found that higher family income was significantly associated with a lower prevalence of diagnosed infections, mental health disorders, injury, asthma, anemia, and substance use disorders and lower 10-year mortality. Read the full original investigation in JAMA.
Key policy takeaways from Renée DiResta on the need to understand how platforms moderate content, David Relman and Megan Palmer on strengthening regulations on risky pathogen research, Steven Pifer on the ramifications of the Ukraine-Russia war on the Kremlin, Larry Diamond on the protests in China, Iran, and Russia, Naomi Egel on protecting civilians during war, and Rose Gottemoeller on U.S. nuclear negotiations with Russia.
At SCCEI, we aim to shed some light on what actually is happening in China, and exactly how these happenings might affect the rest of the world. The 2021-2022 academic year was an unprecedented year of growth for our Center. Take a look at our 2021-22 Annual Report to see all of the incredible work and accomplishments we have achieved together. Download your copy or read it online.
In Science magazine, Stanford researchers Megan Palmer and David Relman are among co-authors recommending a reset of U.S. and global policy to address the gaps and challenges of current guidance.
Advances in Biological Regulation,
December 1, 2022
During the first year of the pandemic, East Asian countries have reported fewer infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 disease than most countries in Europe and the Americas. Our goal in this paper is to generate and evaluate hypothesis that may explain this striking fact. We consider five possible explanations: (1) population age structure (younger people tend to have less severe COVID-19 disease upon infection than older people); (2) the early adoption of lockdown strategies to control disease spread; (3) genetic differences between East Asian population and European and American populations that confer protection against COVID-19 disease; (4) seasonal and climactic contributors to COVID-19 spread; and (5) immunological differences between East Asian countries and the rest of the world. The evidence suggests that the first four hypotheses are unlikely to be important in explaining East Asian COVID-19 exceptionalism. Lockdowns, in particular, fail as an explanation because East Asian countries experienced similarly good infection outcomes despite vast differences in lockdown policies adopted by different countries to control the COVID-19 epidemic. The evidence to date is consistent with our fifth hypothesis – pre-existing immunity unique to East Asia – but there are still essential parts of this story left for scientists to check.
National Bureau of Economic Research,
December 1, 2022
Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of paid family leave (PFL) policies in California, New Jersey, and New York on the labor market and mental health outcomes of individuals whose spouses or children experience health shocks. We use data from the 1996-2019 restricted-use version of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which provides state of residence and the precise timing of hospitalizations and surgeries, our health shock measures. We use difference-in-difference and event-study models to compare the differences in post-health-shock labor market and mental health outcomes between spouses and parents before and after PFL implementation relative to analogous differences in states with no change in PFL access. We find that PFL access leads to a 7.0 percentage point decline in the likelihood that the (healthy) wives of individuals with medical conditions or limitations who experience a hospitalization or surgery report “leaving a job to care for home or family” in the post-health-shock rounds. Impacts of PFL access on women's mental health outcomes and on men whose spouses have health shocks are more mixed, and we find no effects on parents of children with health shocks. Lastly, we show that improvements in job continuity are concentrated among caregivers with 12 or fewer years of education, suggesting that government-provided PFL might reduce disparities in leave access.
