The places where we live, learn, work, and play all contribute to our ability to become and stay healthy. A Culture of Health means everyone has the basics to be as healthy as possible—like access to quality education, employment opportunities, and safe, clean neighborhoods across rural and urban settings.
Kai Hong, Kacie Dragan, and Sherry Glied from P4A's NYU Wagner Research Hub published a paper in the Journal of Health Economics exploring the health impacts of New York City’s 2014 roll-out of a Universal Pre-Kindergarten program.
Public health practitioners and tobacco control advocates agree that pre-emption (a higher level of government stripping lower levels of government of their authority over a specific subject matter) has an adverse impact on tobacco control efforts. Pre-emptive state laws may prohibit local tobacco control measures, such as restrictions on marketing and promotion of tobacco products, licensure of tobacco products, smoking in public or private sites, and on youth access to tobacco products.
State pre-emption is an emerging and highly contentious policy movement with potentially significant consequences on population health. Yet robust analyses to examine whether pre-emption affects health have yet to be conducted. Furthermore, pre-emption’s effect on geographic inequities in health has been largely neglected in policy debates. But it is becoming increasingly clear that state pre-emption laws could reshape the spatial distribution of health, with profound consequences for health care delivery systems and state and local budgets.
Local governments are often on the forefront of enacting innovative public health policy, and local control over public health issues is especially vital to address social inequities. Pre-emption removes the ability of local governments to enact these laws and may hinder public health policy adoption and diffusion within a state and across the country.
Municipal laws and policies affect the social, economic, and legal conditions of civic and private lives of immigrants in profound ways, including both direct access to health services, as well as broader social determinants, such as employment, housing, education, transportation, and law enforcement.
Amid a growing national conversation on equity and social justice, city and county governments are using tools to identify racial and ethnic disparities in their communities. These insights can then inform the development and implementation of laws and policies designed to minimize disparities and maximize positive impacts on racial and ethnic minorities.
Despite efforts to rigorously analyze various effects of changes to minimum wages, the research community has largely neglected the link to child development. Changes in the minimum wage may have consequences that go far beyond employment and earnings, but there is almost nothing known about these potential effects.
Using data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and other publicly available datasets, the research team will investigate:
Recent media reports have highlighted startling trends in U.S. maternal health with stark differences across racial and ethnic groups. Maternal deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth are high when compared to other developed countries and have increased substantially over the last two decades.
Like many communities in the U.S., the Twin Cities metropolitan area has become increasingly vocal around social justice—exposing and documenting local poverty, inequity, and discrimination. Amid this wave, Hennepin County is actively seeking out population health policy opportunities to engage high-risk families and children, with the goal of developing and implementing upstream, cross-sector interventions to preserve unified, healthy families and avoid out of home placements (i.e., foster care).
In 2015, the North Carolina legislature passed “The Healthy Food Small Retailer Program” (HFSRP), allocating $750,000 over three years to small food retailers located in USDA-defined food deserts. These funds could be used to purchase and install refrigeration equipment, display shelving, and other equipment necessary for stocking nutrient-dense foods, including fresh vegetables and fruits, whole grains, lean meats, and seafood.