On the Evidence

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...

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...

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 s...

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 unders...

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 st...

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 l...

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 t...

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 c...

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 characteri...

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...

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/

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 S...

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...

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....

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 li...

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...

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 consump...

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 ep...

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 pol...

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 associa...

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...

Since 2007, the Social Security Administration has collected data on medication use among applicants for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). The administration can then use the medication data to identify opioid use among SSDI applicants. But the data set is so large and the data themselves are unstructured, with the majority of applicants reporting drug names in open-ended text fields, s...

Paid leave can help mothers return to work in the year that a child is born, but what about the next few years? On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about the effects of paid leave on maternal labor force detachment up to four years after a child is born with Kelly Jones, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at American University and a senior research economist at the Inst...

For this episode of On the Evidence, my guests are Maria Cancian, the president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and the dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and Matt Stagner, the current president of APPAM and a vice president at Mathematica. We talk about the theme of APPAM's fall research conference in Denver, which is “...

As social scientists set out to investigate public policy questions, it is vital that they take into account the history of issues and the way people’s emotions will shape interpretations and responses to research findings. That’s the message that Mathematica’s Matt Stagner hopes to convey in his presidential address at a fall research conference hosted by the Association for Public Policy Analysi...