Creating Healthier, More Equitable Communities

Paula Lantz and Samantha Iovan of the University of Michigan Research Hub used their innovative pay-for-success (PFS) surveillance system to identify strengths and challenges of several supportive housing interventions using PFS, and to assess whether PFS housing projects generally meet established criteria for improving social welfare.

Justine Hastings and Jesse M. Shapiro of Brown University released a paper in the American Economic Review analyzing the effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on household spending, finding that every hundred dollars in SNAP benefits leads to between $50 and $60 of additional food spending each month.

Studying the effect of SNAP requires both high-quality data on household food purchases or diet, and a valid strategy for separating the effect of SNAP from other influences on household spending. To circumvent some of these challenges, Jesse Shapiro and Justine Hastings obtained and analyzed large-scale retail data that follows grocery store shoppers over nearly seven years.

Heidi Hartmann and Will Dow are the codirectors of P4A’s new Research Hub at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the University of California, Berkeley. We sat down with them to learn more about their research portfolio and why it matters for policymakers, advocates, and community leaders.

Using a nationwide sample of early childcare centers, Jamie Chriqui, Julien Leider, and Rebecca M. Schermbeck assess centers’ awareness of and reported readiness for implementing updated standards from the Child and Adult Care Food Program.

Jamie Chriqui, Rebecca M. Schermbeck, and Julien Leider assess menu development, meal/snack preparation, provider meal preparation-related training, and food purchasing at early childcare centers.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Program is the nation's single most important source for building and preserving safe and decent affordable rental housing. It is also a potentially powerful tool for improving the health and well-being of low-income families.

Budget cuts have forced many school districts to prioritize school programs, and extracurricular activities such as sports are often viewed as less essential than academics. Yet rather than reducing or eliminating sports programs altogether, some districts are electing to transfer some of the costs of sports participation to student athletes and their families. This opens the door to wide variation of fees and processes, and may contribute to inequities in sports participation for low-income students already at higher-risk for poorer health outcomes.

Proposed budget cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would likely result in a loss of federal housing assistance--and potential rent hikes--for thousands of low-income families. Our forthcoming study will test whether differences in the monetary value of housing assistance received by households translates into meaningful differences in health outcomes.

What kind of cost savings could be achieved if a "Pay for Success" (PFS) financing model were applied to a home-based, multi-component asthma intervention among low-income children on Medicaid in Detroit? The University of Michigan Research Hub team found that the economics of a PFS intervention are most viable if it targets children who have already experienced an expensive episode of asthma-related care.

Last week, an editorial on the decline in US life expectancy, authored by P4A codirector Laudan Aron and Stephen Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, was published in the British Medical Journal.

Starting this month, nine new P4A research teams will embark on projects to illuminate how policies and laws (at the local, state, and national levels, and in the private sector) can help improve population health, well-being, and equity. With topics including paid family leave laws, substance use interventions, and vaccine exemptions, our newly funded research projects represent truly innovative thinking on some of the most urgent issues of our time.