Digital Commons Network^™

Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Housing Instability During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Yung Chun, Stephen Roll, Selina Miller, Hedwig Lee, Savannah Larimore, Michal Grinstein-Weiss

Social Policy Institute Research

Stable and adequate housing is critical in the midst of a pandemic; without housing, individuals and families cannot shelter in place to prevent the spread of disease. Understanding and combating housing hardships in vulnerable populations is therefore essential to a sound public health response. This study aims to explore the pandemic’s disproportionate impacts on housing-related hardships across racial/ethnic groups in the United States as well as the extent to which these disparities are mediated by households’ broader economic circumstances; namely, their pre-pandemic liquid asset levels and the experience of COVID-19-related job and income losses. Using a national survey of over …

It Shouldn’T Take A Pandemic To Increase School Meal Access For Low-Income Students: A Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Analysis Of School Meal Access During Covid-19, Jason Jabbari, Yung Chun, Pranav Nandan, Laura Mcdermott, Tyler Frank, Dan Ferris, Sarah Moreland-Russell, Stephen Roll

Social Policy Institute Research

COVID-19 created an additional barrier for students who benefit from free school meals. While some schools attempted to provide alternative meal access points, many students lack adequate transportation. Thus, physical proximity to meal access points is particularly important during the pandemic. Taking into account both the “supply” and the “demand” for free meals, we employed a two-step floating catchment area analysis to analyze meal accessibility in St. Louis, MO. Overall, while meal access during the spring 2020 semester was substantially lower than the spring 2019 semester, meal access during the 2020 summer was substantially higher than the 2019 summer. Moreover, …

Financial Capability And Asset Building In Social And Economic Development: Advancing The Sustainable Development Goals, David Ansong, Moses Okumu, Jin Huang`, Margaret S. Sherraden, Lissa Johnson, Li Zou

Center for Social Development Research

The concern for economic well-being undergirds most of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This Perspective articulates an agenda for advancing those goals in resource-constrained countries by leveraging financial capability and asset-building (FCAB) strategies. It also specifies a role for financial technology (commonly called “FinTech”) in this work. The authors conclude with a call for better integrating FCAB and FinTech into plans for advancing the SDGs.

Child Development Accounts Improve Parenting Practices, Particularly For Financially Vulnerable Families, Jin Huang

Center for Social Development Research

Parenting practices, such as parental involvement and discipline, define parent–child interactions and influence child functioning. Child Development Accounts may have positive impacts on parenting practices by increasing parents’ perceived levels of economic safety, enhancing their optimism regarding the long-term development of their child, and improving parents’ mental health. This research brief synthesizes findings of the CDA effects on parenting practices from three research studies in the SEED for Oklahoma Kids experiment.

Findings show that the SEED OK CDA has significantly reduced mothers’ punitive parenting practices, and also increased positive parenting practices among mothers in financially vulnerable families. The size of …

Child Development Accounts In The Covid-19 Crisis: Lessons From The Great Recession, Michael Sherraden

Center for Social Development Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an economic downturn that will likely be worse than the Great Recession, especially for financially vulnerable households. Child Development Accounts (CDAs) were rigorously tested in the 2008-09 recession and produced positive financial and family results. Likewise, CDAs can be expected to have positive impacts on children in financially vulnerable households during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

To confront this health and economic crisis, this research and policy report examines how CDA research from the previous recession can inform a new kind of social policy to address the current one. The report draws from in-person interviews …

Ensuring Access To Emerging Covid-19 Treatments Through Medicare Reimbursement Policy, Rachel Sachs, Adam Sacarny

Scholarship@WashULaw

Effective pharmaceutical treatments for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are urgently needed, and there has been an explosion of research into compounds with potential efficacy against the disease. The highest-profile success to date is Gilead Sciences’ antiviral remdesivir, which received an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after preliminary data showed that it may speed patients’ time to recovery.¹ Gilead is just beginning to sell remdesivir commercially. However, Medicare reimbursement policy is likely to pose challenges for hospitals seeking to administer remdesivir and other COVID-19 drugs to patients. Policy makers ought to think critically …

Criminal Law In Crisis, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this Essay, I offer a brief account of how the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the realities and structural flaws of the carceral state. I provide two primary examples or illustrations, but they are not meant to serve as an exhaustive list. Rather, by highlighting these issues, problems, or (perhaps) features, I mean to suggest that this moment of crisis should serve not just as an opportunity to marshal resources to address the pandemic, but also as a chance to address the harsh realities of the U.S. criminal system. Further, my claim isn’t that criminal law is in some way …