Making Health a Shared Value

Policies for Action grantees recently gathered for an exclusive training on sharing and promoting research, hosted by communications experts at the Urban Institute. That day, we were also joined by a group of seasoned policymakers and staffers for a conversation about elevating evidence to inform policy debates. Here’s what we learned.

Rebecca M. Schermbeck, Julien Leider, and Jamie F. Chriqui release the first-ever report on whether CACFP-participating early childhood centers are limiting sugary cereals for children aged 2-5 years. Nearly one-third of these centers failed to meet the sugar-in-cereal requirement.

In a new issue brief examining the 2017 San Francisco Paid Parental Leave Ordinance, Julia M. Goodman, William H. Dow and Holly Elser find little evidence that implementing new paid family leave policies or expanding existing policies negatively affects employers.

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.

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.

To date, sick pay mandates have been implemented in seven states and dozens of cities across the U.S. Nicolas R. Ziebarth of Cornell University and colleague Stefan Pichler of ETH Zurich assess the causal labor market effects of nine city-level and four state-level pay mandates.

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.

Peter Jacobson of the University of Michigan research hub writes on Harvard Law's Bill of Health blog that while legal mandates are not necessary to carrying out HiAP (Health in All Policies) initiatives, political support for them is.

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.

The University of Michigan Research Hub conducted 65 semi-structured interviews with state and local officials in five states where "Health in All Policies" initiatives were underway, with a goal of examining whether and how policymakers and advocates use the framework to elevate health equity as a policy concern across sectors and jurisdictions.

Five years ago, a groundbreaking report showed people in the US in worse health and dying younger than those in other rich nations. Today, despite the alarm the report generated, we learned that life expectancy in the country declined for a second year in a row – astonishing by any standard.