P4A Spark

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.

Kacie Dragan of our NYU Wagner School Research Hub writes about collaborating with local criminal justice and public health agencies to better understand the health needs of justice-involved New Yorkers.

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.

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.

The recent P4A conference at NYU's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service highlighted the power of partnerships with policymakers and practitioners to make research relevant and actionable.

Sherry Glied writes on the importance of researchers to anticipate the needs of policymakers when designing their research studies to account for the "unpredictable and sometimes messy world of politics."

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.