Between a pandemic, an economic recession, and heightened awareness about social injustice, 2020 presented no shortage of urgent health and social challenges that required immediate responses based on emerging data and research. In this episode of On the Evidence, Mathematica’s Adam Coyne, Jill Constantine, and Chris Trenholm reflect on how Mathematica and its partners rose to meet those challenges. Coyne, Constantine, and Trenholm are the general managers of Mathematica’s international, human s...
Jan 13, 2021•45 min
In early spring, states were scrambling to learn from one another how to scale up contact tracing for COVID-19. Staff at Mathematica and the National Academy of State Health Policy (NASHP) recognized that states needed a single place to find accurate, up-to-date publicly available information about the decisions that other states were making in response to the pandemic. To help states as they develop and refine their approaches to contact tracing, NASHP and Mathematica partnered to create and ma...
Dec 09, 2020•23 min
For more than two decades, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supported evidence-based programs in India that promote reproductive health and rights. As the foundation phased out its grantmaking related to population and reproductive health, it partnered with Mathematica to conduct a cumulative review of its efforts to improve maternal health in India. The foundation’s maternal health quality of care strategy in India sought to improve the trajectory of health for women, children,...
Nov 25, 2020•36 min
In his research, Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, has explored the causal relationship between school spending and student outcomes. His work has also shed light on the role that teachers and schools play in helping students acquire skills and succeed in the long run. Jackson is the 20th winner of the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize, established to recognize young professionals under the age of 40 who have made distinguished contributions to the field of public policy. D...
Nov 11, 2020•34 min
For about a decade, the national supply of teachers has steadily declined, a trend that is expected to continue even as the demand for new teachers is projected to increase. Not only do schools and school districts need enough teachers, but they want to recruit and retain effective teachers. Because evidence suggests that students of color benefit academically from having a teacher who shares their racial or ethnic identity, increasing the number of effective teachers likely means, among other t...
Oct 28, 2020•41 min
In mid-September, researchers from Mathematica partnered with the Pennsylvania Department of Education to run 400,000 simulations intended to inform school operating and closure strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The simulations predict the level of spread of COVID-19 infection in schools, taking into account a range of factors. These factors include school type and size, the community infection rate, school mask policies and other precautions, in-person opening strategies, and potential s...
Oct 14, 2020•19 min
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected people in long-term care settings, who only make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population but represented more than 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States in September. In Connecticut, that disproportionate impact was even more severe: as of July 30, about 72 percent of the state’s COVID-19-related deaths were among long-term care residents. On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Patricia Rowan and Debra Lipson of Mathema...
Oct 07, 2020•34 min
Although performance measurement and program evaluation are both ostensibly about assessing the effectiveness of government, they have historically meant different things in terms of what gets assessed and who does the assessing. Performance measurement is more commonly associated with ongoing monitoring and reporting of program accomplishments and is typically conducted by program or agency staff. Program evaluation, on the other hand, is more commonly associated with periodic or ad hoc studies...
Sep 16, 2020•47 min
As states and counties grapple with containing the spread of COVID-19, they have learned that the virus places novel demands on contact tracing efforts. Early experiences from states with contact tracing programs suggest that a successful contact tracing program needs to account for the economic circumstances of people infected, as well as their families; it needs to account for the emotional and psychological ramifications of learning you and your loved ones are at risk of infection; it also ne...
Sep 02, 2020•46 min
Sarah Lieff wants to know if the Medicaid expansion, which made mental health services more affordable to low-income Americans in many states, resulted in greater access and improved quality of mental health treatment for those who need it. Rachel Perera is interested in the effects of investigations for civil rights violations related to racial discrimination in school discipline. Both Lieff and Perera are continuing their doctoral research as Mathematica summer fellows. For this episode of On ...
Aug 19, 2020•36 min
In early June, as communities across the country organized protests against racism in all its forms, Mathematica released a statement denouncing social injustice and affirming that black lives matter. This episode provides insight behind why Mathematica's CEO wanted to make that statement. It's also about how the events in late May and early June prompted two lifelong friends to talk about race in ways they hadn’t before. The guests for this episode are Paul Decker and Chris Williams. Decker is ...
Jul 29, 2020•56 min
This episode focuses on young people between the ages of 14 and 24 who have disabilities and must navigate a complex bureaucracy to access benefits and support services. Our guests are Dave Wittenburg and Kim Kaiser. Wittenburg, who is the disability area director at Mathematica, has an expertise in interventions to promote employment for people with disabilities, particularly interventions that serve youth as they transition into adulthood. Kaiser is an autism advocate, a certified peer support...
Jul 15, 2020•44 min
Before March 2020, a search for the keyword “coronavirus” would have turned up zero results on Mathematica’s website. Now the word and its sibling, COVID-19, appear in more than two dozen pages about contact tracing, wastewater testing, disease modeling, workforce planning, and more. Owing to the wide-ranging effects of the novel coronavirus, Mathematica’s experts have sprung into action to understand its implications for primary care, child protective services, behavioral health, remote learnin...
Jul 01, 2020•26 min
In early 2019, the Urban Institute published a brief about addressing structural racism through research and policy analysis. The paper summarizes lessons, promising practices, and recommendations previously discussed in a roundtable with 23 research groups. At the time of publication, the paper’s authors did not know that communities across the country would soon be organizing protests against structural racism in the wake of a recent string of high-profile incidents in which people of color we...
Jun 19, 2020•31 min
In March, the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations in the United States to adopt virtual and remote work wherever possible. This was especially true in health care, with hospitals and physician practices needing to clear their waiting rooms and minimize the risk of infections for patients and providers. As a result, Congress and the federal government removed many of the regulatory barriers—at least temporarily—that prevented patients from receiving care through video chats and phone calls. Th...
Jun 11, 2020•48 min
On this episode of On the Evidence, we discuss life coaching, a violence reduction strategy being used by the city of Oakland, California, to help young people who have been involved with the juvenile justice system. Mathematica studied youth life coaching as part of a larger evaluation of Oakland Unite, a city initiative that supports community-based violence prevention programs. We interviewed the following guests: Peter Kim, manager of Oakland Unite Naihobe Gonzalez, senior researcher at Math...
May 13, 2020•27 min
It’s increasingly clear that although the novel 2019 coronavirus does not discriminate in who it infects, it does harm some groups of people more than others. The emerging evidence suggests that people who are Black, are 65 and older, or have certain conditions, such as diabetes or hypertension, are more likely to become severely ill from COVID-19. But income and occupation also play a role. The current pandemic has exposed inequities in society where, for example, segments of the workforce do n...
Apr 29, 2020•26 min
As schools close in order to contain the spread of COVID-19, some students are in a better position to continue learning from home than others. Even when students aren’t grappling with the fallout of a pandemic, they face disparities in their educational experiences and opportunities due to their differences in family income, differences in racial, ethnic, or other important demographic characteristics, and differences in access to technology. Some state and local education leaders are proactive...
Apr 08, 2020•1 hr 2 min
As technology improves organizations’ ability to collect, manage, and analyze data, it’s becoming easier to inform public policy decisions today in a range of areas, from health care to criminal justice, based on estimated risks in the future. On this episode of On the Evidence, I talk with three researchers who work with child welfare agencies in the United States to use algorithms—or, what they call predictive risk models—to inform decisions by case managers and their supervisors. My guests ar...
Mar 25, 2020•43 min
On this episode of On the Evidence, we check in with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Fanta Traore a year after the group they co-founded, the Sadie Collective, held its inaugural conference about, for, and by black women in economics and related fields. Find more information about the Sadie Collective here: https://www.sadiecollective.org/
Mar 11, 2020•21 min
Since the early 2000s, federal policy has encouraged customized employment strategies to help people with significant disabilities secure paid jobs. Through customized employment, the relationship between the job seeker and employer is personalized so that the needs of both are met through negotiation of the worker’s job duties and flexible work arrangements. About eight years ago, the nonprofit SourceAmerica launched a new program called Pathways to Careers that combined several types of custom...
Feb 26, 2020•30 min
Today’s episode is about sharing and explaining policy research. After putting in the hours to collect the data, analyze the findings, and report on your results, how do you ensure that people outside of academia learn what you’ve found and understand why it matters? My guests for this episode are economists Jennifer Doleac and Kosali Simon, who recently participated on a panel about interpreting and translating the relevance of policy research at a research conference hosted by the Association ...
Feb 12, 2020•31 min
Every summer, Mathematica welcomes a handful of doctoral students to spend 12 weeks at one of our nine office locations, working on an independent research project that intersects with one or more of Mathematica's focus areas. On this episode of On the Evidence, we feature six short interviews with the 2019 summer fellows about the research questions they pursued and what they have learned so far. In most cases, the fellows are joined by a mentor from Mathematica. Find more information about Mat...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 19 min
The federal government funds a variety of national nutrition programs to combat hunger among children and families, and yet roughly 37 million Americans were food insecure in 2018, and 6 million of them were children, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In some parts of the country, food insecurity is made worse by a lack of accessible and affordable options. That is, if you live in a rural area with limited public transportation and no major supermarkets nearby, you may rely...
Jan 08, 2020•27 min
One of the ways that the United States is an outlier among high-income industrialized nations is that it does not have a national paid family leave program. Some U.S. states and cities, however, have enacted paid family leave, and more are on track to do so in the next few years. For this episode of On the Evidence, we speak with Jeff Hayes, the program director of job quality and income security at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and a scholar in residence at American University. Jeff...
Dec 20, 2019•21 min
Since 2015, a handful of U.S. cities have begun taxing soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, economists from Mathematica, the University of Iowa, and Cornell University studied the impacts of those taxes on purchases, consumption, prices, and product availability. The project was the first to publish results on changes in children's consumption in U.S. cities with a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. It was also the first to publish result...
Dec 18, 2019•40 min
On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about using behavioral nudges and low-cost experiments in local government. Our guests are Brendan Babb, the chief innovation officer and innovation team director for the municipality of Anchorage, Alaska, and Emily Cardon, head of research for the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) in North America. To learn more about the case studies referenced in this episode, check out BIT's publications page (https://www.bi.team/our-work/publications/) and blog (http...
Dec 11, 2019•46 min
On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about policy research by, about, and for indigenous communities. Our guests are Cheryl Ellenwood, a PhD candidate in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and Laura Evans, an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. We discuss efforts to build a community of policy researchers focused on issues important to indigenous communities, the need for more and better ...
Nov 25, 2019•19 min
A growing body of research have found that small-scale behavioral nudge campaigns can get students to complete complex tasks, such as refiling for federal financial aid to attend college. But researchers don't yet know enough about why certain nudges have worked in the past or whether they would still work on a larger scale. On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk with Jenna Kramer, an associate policy researcher at RAND Corporation, and Kelly Ochs Rosinger, an assistant professor in the Dep...
Nov 21, 2019•22 min
State and local governments often lack the capacity to clean, manage, and analyze administrative data that could be useful for achieving political and policy objectives. Some places have established policy labs to leverage researchers' skills to identify trends in the data, evaluate programs, and provide insights for improving public policies. On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about the policy lab model with Kristin Klopfenstein, director of the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab, and ...
Nov 19, 2019•38 min
