Economic Justice

Spreading Fear: Public Charge Rule Announcement Reduced Enrollment In Child Safety-Net Programs

by Jeremy Barofsky, Ariadna Vargas, Dinardo Rodriguez, and Anthony Barrows

On February 24, 2020, the Trump administration’s expanded “public charge” rule took effect.  Afterward, the Department of Homeland Security could reject an immigrant’s application for permanent residence for using safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps). The rule’s adoption was the culmination of a years-long […]

De-biasing the Process to Drive Diversity in Tech Entrepreneurship with Ventures for Shared Prosperity

by ideas42

Like so many of the world’s innovators, when Janica Alvarez became fed up with a terrible product, she invented a better one, in this case a breast pump. Her smart pump enables faster, more comfortable pumping, and allows mothers to track their output. Breast pumps hadn’t been improved in years, and there was strong demand […]

Now Is the Time to Improve the WIC Participant Experience

by Rebecca Oran

The ways in which participants experience public benefit programs like The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), often overlooked, is more relevant now than ever. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is facing historic numbers of individuals who are out of work. Many find themselves in the position of […]

Street Smarts in the Field: Insights for Designing Public Housing Infrastructure

by Nuha Saho

  For several years, city governments across the world have been incorporating insights from behavioral science to help design new policies and programs to solve important problems. This entails behavioral experts designing interventions to support groups or communities they themselves may not belong to. In fact, a strength behavioral scientists bring to pervasive problems is […]

Ethical Machine Learning

by ideas42

  Applied together, it is fair to say that machine learning and behavioral science have the potential to significantly magnify social impact. Yet, as machine learning algorithms become more prevalent in the systems people use to make important decisions, there is deep, and not unfounded, concern that algorithms – even those designed with social impact […]

Could Temporary, Behaviorally Informed Changes to WIC Be Program Fixtures?

by Antonia Violante & Allison Yates-Berg

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people have lost their jobs or are finding it even harder to stretch their paycheck to meet their needs. Many are finding that they need social safety net programs to ensure the health and well-being of their families, often for the first time. One of these […]

ideas42 Stands for Racial Justice

by ideas42

We are disgusted by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. We are angry about the ongoing racism faced by Black people. This anger is not new in the US, as Black Americans have faced a long history of racist violence driven not by a few bad actors, but by systemic racism […]

Doing More with Less: Behavioral Insights for Humanitarian Cash and Vouchers

by Meghann Perez, Senior Associate, ideas42 & Holly Welcome Radice, Cash and Markets Technical Advisor, CARE

Cash and voucher assistance changed humanitarian response forever. In 2015, the High Level Panel on Cash Transfers directed humanitarian agencies  to implement unconditional cash transfers at scale whenever possible, and the advice was heeded. Preliminary findings suggest an estimated 60 percent scale-up of total cash and voucher delivery from 2016 to 2018—from US$2 billion in […]

Making Government COVID-19 Communications More Effective

by Rebecca Oran & Octavio Medina

This is part of a series of posts about behavioral science and COVID-19. Click here to read about some of the most important behaviors during this pandemic—like seeking medical help, responding to humanitarian crises, and adapting to remote work in a global outbreak. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many public benefits programs in the United […]

Behavioral Design for Public Agencies’ COVID-19 Response

by Rachel Rosenberg

This is part of a series of posts about behavioral science and COVID-19. Click here to read about some of the most important behaviors during this pandemic—like seeking medical help, responding to humanitarian crises, and adapting to remote work in a global outbreak. Across the country, tens of thousands of new cases of COVID-19 are reported every […]

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