Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S.-Russia Relations after the Cold War
Rose Gottemoeller uses lessons learned from U.S.-Russia relations during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations to offer insights into how Russia today may be convinced to end its war against Ukraine and resume cooperation for the sake of global security.
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder
A clear-eyed look from Michael McFaul at how the rise of autocratic China and Russia are compelling some to think that we have entered a new Cold War—and why we must reject that thinking in order to prevail.
The National College Entrance Examination shapes the future of millions of students in China each year, but Hongbin Li and Ruixue Jia illuminate how this test of all tests is also shaping education, labor markets, political legitimacy, and social values beyond the PRC.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),
September 18, 2023
Extreme air pollution events, like those from wildfires, negatively affect health through physiological responses but may also be salient enough to induce behavioral changes in individuals protecting their own health. The net impacts of these complex tradeoffs are poorly characterized. By joining the near-universe of emergency department visits in California from 2006 to 2017 with spatially and temporally resolved estimates of ambient wildfire smoke, we find total visits respond nonlinearly to increasing wildfire smoke concentrations, but that response differs by cause of visit. Total visits increase at lower concentrations but then decline at higher concentrations, suggesting that populations shift their behaviors following salient smoke periods. Whereas respiratory-related visits steadily increase, visits for accidental injuries and non-respiratory symptoms like stomach pains decline at high smoke concentrations.
Chapter in One Hundred Years of Turkish Foreign Policy (1923-2023), eds. Binnur Özkeçeci-Taner and Sinem Akgül Açıkmeşe. Part of the Global Foreign Policy Studies book series (GFPS).
Economic Development and Cultural Change,
September 15, 2023
Besides increasing knowledge, there is another potential mechanism at work when information is delivered to a treatment group: increasing the salience of existing knowledge. We use data from a randomized controlled trial of a health information campaign to explore the relative importance of this additional mechanism in a real-world environment. The health information campaign addressed the benefits of wearing eyeglasses and provided information meant to address the common misconceptions that contribute to low adoption rates of eyeglasses. In total, our study sample included 931 students with poor vision (mostly myopia), their parents, and their homeroom teachers in 84 primary schools in rural China. We find that the health information campaign was able to successfully increase student ownership and wearing of eyeglasses, relative to a control group. We demonstrate that the campaign had a larger impact when levels of preexisting information among certain subgroups of participants—namely, parents of students—were higher while we simultaneously provided new information to others. This suggests that the interaction between directed attention (i.e., salience) and baseline knowledge is important. We do not, however, find similar increases among teachers or the students themselves and additionally find no impacts on academic outcomes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have limited the federal government’s ability to impose vaccination mandates; some judges have also questioned whether states must grant religious exemptions to vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision in Groff v DeJoy2 concerning Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 raises new questions about the ability of private employers—including health care organizations—to enforce vaccination requirements for employees who have religious objections.
This study examines the level and equity of household education spending in China using representative microdata. The findings reveal that education expenditure constitutes a substantial portion of household income, averaging around 17.1%. Moreover, there is an inverse relationship between household income and the fraction of income spent on education, with the top quartile spending 10.6% of their income on education, while the bottom quartile spends a staggering 56.8%. Regression analysis indicates an income elasticity of 0.306, implying that education is a necessity good in China. These results underscore the excessive financial burden imposed by education expenditure, particularly on families in the lower income bracket. To promote equal opportunities and achieve broad, long-term economic benefits, it is imperative to implement new public policies in China that improve the affordability of education for a broader segment of the population.
Objective To test the feasibility and effectiveness of a mindfulness-based intervention in rural-to-urban migrant Chinese children using trained community volunteers.
Method Migrant students ages 9 to 16 from 5 schools in Shanghai (N = 653) were randomly assigned to a mindfulness only group (n = 167), a mindfulness plus life skills group (n = 118), or a waitlist control group (n = 368). The first 2 groups received an 8-week mindfulness intervention delivered 1 hour weekly by trained community volunteers. The mindfulness plus life skills group received 8 additional hours of skills-based mentorship. Measurements on mindfulness, resilience, and anxiety and depression symptoms were collected before and after intervention. Multivariable regression analyses compared the intervention vs control groups.
Results Before intervention, there were no significant demographic or outcome measure differences between groups except that students in the intervention groups were slightly older. Students had relatively low levels of mindfulness and prosociality difficulties and similar degrees of depression and anxiety symptoms compared with prior studies. After intervention, no statistically significant differences were found in mean scores for mindfulness, resilience, anxiety, or depression in the intervention vs control groups.
Conclusion A volunteer-led mindfulness intervention did not significantly benefit migrant Chinese children after 8 weeks. More implementation research is needed for low-cost, scalable, and contextually effective mental health prevention programs.
Background: Prenatal anaemia causes serious consequences for both mother and foetus, and dietary factors are suggested to be associated with anaemia. However, research in pregnant women living in rural areas is limited. We aim to assess the contribution of dietary diversity to the magnitude of prenatal anaemia in rural China and identify the interactions between dietary diversity and several sociodemographic and maternal characteristics in relation to anaemia. Methods: A multi-stage random cluster sampling method was used to select pregnant women in rural western China. The Woman’s Dietary Diversity Score was created to measure dietary diversity, which was recoded into terciles. Multinomial logistic regression models were used to assess the associations between dietary diversity score terciles and the magnitude of prenatal anaemia. Multiplicative interactions were tested by adding the product term of dietary diversity and several sociodemographic and maternal characteristics into the regression models. Results: Out of 969 participants, 54.3% were measured as anaemic, with 28.6% mildly anaemic and 25.7% moderately to severely anaemic. There was an absence of agreement between self-reported and measured anaemia status (κ = 0.28, 95% CI [0.22–0.34]). Participants in the highest dietary diversity score tercile had lower odds of being moderately to severely anaemic after adjusting for potential confounders (RRR = 0.65, 95% CI [0.44, 0.98]). In participants with moderate to severe anaemia, significant interactions were found between dietary diversity score terciles, age, and parity (p for interaction < 0.05). Conclusions: The prevalence of prenatal anaemia in rural China remains high, and pregnant women living in these areas are insufficiently aware of their anaemia status. Improving dietary diversity is needed to manage prenatal anaemia in rural areas.
