New Ideas, New Horizons
The Opportunity for Health Lab is currently working on a range of new, policy-relevant topics:
- Our team is involved in a number of projects examining how economic opportunity and health interact during the Covid-19 pandemic. These include projects on drivers of social distancing and the impact of economic policies on financial health.
- In work funded by the National Institutes of Health, we are investigating how structural racism—as embodied by officer-involved killings of unarmed individuals—leads to racial disparities in sleep (a key driver of racial disparities in health).
- We are initiating a new research program on economic opportunity and health focusing on the health care sector, the largest employer in the United States. Our early work has examined how shifts in wage policies may influence health and economic outcomes among low-wage health care workers. Our forthcoming work examines the impacts of hospital closures, mergers, and insurance expansions on employment opportunities and wages among low-wage workers.
- We are working on survey-based randomized experiments to understand how beliefs about economic opportunities impact whether people adopt healthy behaviors.
