Covid-19 is the single largest threat to global public health since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-20. Was the world better prepared in 2020 than it was in 1918? After a century of public health and basic science research, pandemic response and mortality outcomes should be better than in...

New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when...

We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985-2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries from 1975-2002, shows different...

Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents - particularly males - has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an...

This note considers a relatively new form of financing for social services, the "Social Impact Bond." Proponents of Social Impact Bonds argue that they present a solution to several problems in funding social services, including performance measurement and the distribution of risk. Using a...

Objectives: This study estimates the value that clients place on drug rehabilitation services at the time of intake and how this value varies with the probability of success and availability of social services.Methods: We interviewed 241 heroin users who had been referred to, but had not yet...

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government...

This study focuses on network effects' in the utilization of publicly funded prenatal care using Vital Statistics data from California for 1989 to 2000. Networks are defined using 5-digit zipcodes and a woman's racial or ethnic group. Like others, we find evidence that the use of public programs...

Education is usually the most important predictor of political and social engagement. Over the last half century, educational levels in the United States have risen sharply, yet levels of political and social participation have not. Norman Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry (NJS-B) have...

This paper estimates the impact of income on the long-term care utilization of elderly Americans using a natural experiment that led otherwise similar retirees to receive significantly different Social Security payments based on their year of birth. Using data from the 1993 and 1995 waves of the...