Bau on Intersection of Culture and Policy

Assistant Professor of Public Policy Natalie Bau was interviewed by the American Economic Association about her research on the effect of pension reform on traditional family arrangements in Indonesia and Ghana. Bau explained that she was curious about how traditional customs of sons and daughters living with their parents after getting married might incentivize parents to make educational investments. She found that pensions led parents to invest less in the education of children who would have traditionally supported them in old age, and it also resulted in more of those children leaving home after marriage rather than continuing to live with their parents, as was the customary practice. She noted that even though her research shows that the pension program in Indonesia is reducing female education, there are still benefits. The best solution would be to “combine the pension policy with other policies that mitigate these negative effects on female education,” she concluded.


Millard-Ball on the Tradeoff of Wide Streets

A San Francisco Chronicle article highlighted research findings by Urban Planning Associate Professor Adam Millard-Ball on the width of streets in San Francisco. In places with housing shortages, wide streets take up valuable land that could have been used to build more homes or other buildings, Millard-Ball said. While the average street in San Francisco is 50 feet wide, Millard-Ball proposed 16 feet as the functional minimum width for residential streets. In some areas of the city, streets are an average of 93 feet wide. Millard-Ball argued that in high-cost California counties like Santa Clara and San Francisco, the consequences of unnecessarily wide streets are enough to make the costs to narrow them worth it. For cities that are still growing, Millard-Ball suggested that planners build narrower streets to save land for housing. In established cities where narrowing the streets is not feasible, he proposed adapting unused street spaces into outdoor dining spaces, slow streets and other recreational spaces.


Shah Co-Authors Report on Disproportionate COVID-19 Risk Among Latinos Local context is a key factor in the level of risk, the study of Medicaid patients in Contra Costa County finds

By Stan Paul

UCLA Luskin Professor of Public Policy Manisha Shah co-authored a study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, that showed Latinos had much higher odds of testing positive for COVID-19 than whites.

The USC-UCLA study, conducted in a Northern California regional medical center with a diverse group of adults enrolled in a county Medicaid managed care plan, also indicated a marked racial disparity in odds of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Researchers noted that, while the coronavirus has disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minorities nationwide, in their California study, infection, hospitalization and death were higher for Latinos, but not Black patients, relative to white patients.

The researchers point out that socioeconomic differences may confound racial and ethnic differences in testing and that “the role of sociodemographic, clinical and neighborhood factors in accounting for racial/ethnic differences in COVID-19 outcomes remains unclear.”

The study included data from more than 84,000 adult Medicaid patients at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center. The researchers hypothesized that, because all of the patients had Medicaid, “racial/ethnic disparities in testing and outcomes would narrow when controlling for demographics, comorbidities and ZIP code-level characteristics.”

They also expected that these characteristics would be reduced relative to previous studies, given similar insurance coverage, household income and access to health-care providers. Among their conclusions, the researchers highlighted that racial and ethnic disparities depend on local context, citing studies from other states with differing results.

“The substantially higher risk facing Latinos should be a key consideration in California’s strategies to mitigate disease transmission and harm,” they recommend.

“We learned a lot about testing and hospitalization disparities through this study,” Shah said. “We recently implemented a randomized controlled trial with our Contra Costa County partners to better understand vaccine take-up among the vaccine hesitant.”

Shah said that the research team is testing the role of financial incentives, reducing appointment scheduling frictions, and provider messages on COVID-19 vaccine take-up in this diverse Medicaid managed care population.

“We are excited to share the results from this vaccine take-up study very soon,” Shah said.

Additional authors include Mireille Jacobson, associate professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer School for Health Policy and Economics; Tom Chang, associate professor of finance and business economics at the USC Marshall School of Business; Samir Shah, CEO of Contra Costa Regional Medical Center; and Rajiv Pramanik at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center & Health Centers, Contra Costa Health Service.

Human Rights Over Property Rights, Vestal Says

The Los Angeles Times spoke to Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Mark Vestal for a column about the growing issue of homelessness in Los Angeles. Experts estimate that there are at least 60,000 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles and as many as 365,000 renting households on the brink of eviction. While most Angelenos agree that homelessness is a pressing issue, they disagree on whether it is a property rights issue or a human rights issue, which makes it difficult to find a solution. “The history of homelessness testifies to the futility of trying to find solutions that average these two perspectives,” Vestal said. Enforcing property rights on people experiencing homelessness only creates more obstacles to ending homelessness. “You can’t just criminalize a condition that people can’t cure,” Vestal said. “These problems that we have created — they are all intimately tied up with the good things we thought we were making of our society.”


Newton on Villanueva’s Uncertain Future

Jim Newton, editor of UCLA’s Blueprint magazine, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s decline in favorability since his shift to the political right. In 2018, Villanueva campaigned for sheriff as a relatively unknown Democratic candidate and promised police reform and transparency. However, since being elected, Villanueva has resisted calls for greater transparency, pursued controversial hires and resisted multiple subpoenas. The sheriff responded to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and widespread demands for police reform by publicly rebuking local elected Democrats and working to increase the number of people permitted to carry concealed guns in Los Angeles County. The story cited UCLA’s 2021 Quality of Life Index, which found that Villanueva’s favorability has decreased since he was elected; he will be on the ballot for reelection in 2022. “Whether Villanueva is vulnerable depends in huge measure on who runs against him,” Newton said. “Without a credible opponent, none of this really matters.”


Luskin Career Bootcamp Equips Graduates for Job Search

UCLA Luskin graduate students from the Class of 2021 gained valuable knowledge about searching for and securing a job through a two-day virtual Career Bootcamp. The series was designed by Luskin Career Services to help current and recently graduated students jumpstart their job search and learn about networking, interviewing and offer negotiation. At the beginning of the July 13-14 event, students and graduates described their current job search status, which allowed the Career Services team to tailor the sessions to the needs and goals of individual participants. Technology is always transforming the way that people find jobs, and the pandemic has brought new changes to the job search process. Attendees learned about the importance of tailoring a cover letter and resume to rank well in applicant tracking systems, which are largely automated. The Bootcamp also highlighted the importance of networking, noting that 70% of all jobs are not published publicly on job sites and up to 80% of jobs are filled through personal and professional connections. Counselors recommended building genuine relationships and making networking a habit, not just something you do when you need a job. Day 2 of the Bootcamp provided insights about interviewing for a job, both virtually and in person. Attendees also learned about factors to consider when evaluating initial salary and benefit packages before accepting a final job offer. The Luskin Career Services team is available for one-on-one counseling appointments for career guidance and exploration, resume and cover letter critiques, mock interviews and other career-related topics. — Zoe Day


Tilly on the Intrusiveness of AI Technology

Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly was featured in a Fox32 news segment about the growing use of artificial intelligence technology in the food industry. Many stores such as McDonald’s and Amazon Go are testing drive-thru and AI invisible checkout systems. Tilly explained that these new technologies have an impact on both consumers and the workforce. “To some extent, workers are being replaced by this technology,” he said. “At the same time, the expansion of services like curbside pickup means that workers are being added.” While the workforce may be balanced out by the expansion of these new technologies, Tilly noted that the services can be very intrusive for consumers. “Artificial intelligence is always on, always tracking what people are doing,” he said. While the Amazon Go model has currently only been implemented in small stores with many sensors and cameras, Tilly predicted that technology will most likely allow companies to expand these services in the long run.


Study Measures Americans’ Growing Medical Debt

Over the last decade, medical bills have become the largest source of debt that Americans owe collection agencies, according to new research co-authored by Associate Professor of Public Policy Wesley Yin. The $140 billion in unpaid health care bills, held by about 18% of Americans, now exceeds all other debt in collections combined, according to the paper just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Only debts referred to collection agencies were measured; other unpaid bills owed to health-care providers would push the total amount of debt even higher. Yin and co-authors Raymond Kluender of Harvard Business School, Neale Mahoney of Stanford University and Francis Wong of the National Bureau of Economic Research examined records from the credit rating agency TransUnion from January 2009 to June 2020, reflecting medical care delivered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their comprehensive look at the evolution of medical debt reveals that, while Americans’ household finances largely recovered after the Great Recession, medical debt continued to grow. Yin said the debt was most concentrated in low-income communities and in the South. He added that, in 12 states that chose not to expand Medicaid coverage, significant disparities grew even worse during the period studied. “Addressing the problem of medical debt in the U.S. health care system must be a high priority,” said the authors of a JAMA editorial accompanying the study. “In addition to the potential consequences for health and health care use, the economic and social ramifications of medical debt are likely equally consequential, if not more so.”


 

Ong on L.A.’s ‘Web of Urban Inequality’

A Los Angeles Times story on landlords who skirt anti-eviction rules enacted in response to the COVID-19 outbreak cited research from the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) at UCLA Luskin. A Times analysis of data from the Los Angeles Police Department revealed more than 290 instances of potential illegal lockouts and utility shutoffs across the city over 10 weeks beginning in March. The largest share of those police calls was in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods in South L.A. CNK research shows that members of these communities, who faced disproportionately high rent burdens even before the pandemic, often work in food service and other sectors with significant wage reductions and job losses due to COVID-19. “This is a web of urban inequality,” CNK Director Paul Ong said. “We could talk about housing, we could talk about jobs, we could talk about health. But the truth of the matter is all these things are interlocked.”


 

Citizen Monitoring May Help Forest Conservation Globally

A UCLA-led study is part of special collection of reports released today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) focused on at-risk global natural resources. The combined studies, “Sustaining the Commons,” represent the work of teams who focused their research on six regions of the world, including Africa, Amazonia and China. Each team analyzed the role that community monitoring of common-pool resources, such as forests and water, can play to support sustainable management of those natural resources. Darin Christensen, assistant professor of public policy and political science at UCLA Luskin, and his team focused on a yearlong program of community monitoring efforts in Liberia. The African nation is experiencing a relatively rapid deforestation due to timber sales and the conversion of land for small-scale and commercial agriculture, according to Christensen. “The benefits from this economic activity are not broadly distributed: Those in power amass benefits, while many Liberians see forests cleared and little compensation,” said Christensen, who worked with political scientists Alexandra C. Hartman of University College London and Cyrus Samii of New York University. “The status quo is untenable,” Christensen said. “Environmentally, it’s permanently degrading forests; socially, it’s entrenching inequality and poverty.” Christensen and colleagues found that the program helped rural communities in Liberia monitor communal forests by increasing knowledge about land management. However, the program did not decrease deforestation, suggesting that communities may need compensation to forgo forest use. “Collectively, we hope the studies demonstrate that empowering communities can help to improve the management of natural resources,” Christensen said.