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Most of the research on the biology of fatherhood has focused on fathers in the U.S., Europe and some Asian countries. In these settings, levels of some hormones, such as lower testosterone and higher oxytocin, have been linked to more nurturing fathering. A Notre Dame research team wants to take a wider view. The role of fathers can vary greatly across cultures, and the researchers aimed to test whether the biology of fatherhood did, too. To get a more complete picture of hormones and fatherhood that includes different cultures, social support systems, and social hierarchies, Lee Gettler, associate professor of anthropology, led a team that worked with the BaYaka and Bondongo societies in the Republic of the Congo. The team’s paper was published this week in Nature magazine’s Scientific Reports.

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Women in the academic field of psychology are overrepresented at the undergraduate level but, ultimately, underrepresented at senior levels. No gender parity reviews of the discipline had been conducted until a group of scholars, including Lee Anna Clark, the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Psychology, decided to take on the task. Clark and the other researchers found that women are less likely to apply for tenure-track positions; however, those who do apply are equally if not more likely to be hired than men.

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The economic effects of the coronavius in the U.S. have brought Americans’ preexisting financial precarity into stark focus. Karen Richman, director of undergraduate studies at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, found in a recent study that many people in the U.S. are relying on informal networks of family and friends to stay afloat.

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A recent study by University of Notre Dame economists Kasey Buckles, William Evans, and Ethan Lieber — all affiliated with Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) — found that greater exposure to the opioid crisis increases the chance that a child’s mother or father is absent from the household and increases the likelihood that he or she lives in a household headed by a grandparent.

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Assistant Professor of Economics Michèle Müller-Itten and her co-author, Aniko Öry from Yale University, created a model to investigate what workforce compositions would naturally emerge in a labor market and which would maximize total productivity. Their results show it is often best for optimal efficiency if the minority group is overrepresented in the workforce relative to the majority — a conclusion that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that affirmative action will eventually be obsolete.

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Research by David Cortez, assistant professor of political science, found that Latinxs — regardless of their preferred national/ethnic identity, their identification with the immigrant experience or their attitude toward immigrants — choose to work in immigration for their own economic interest.

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To get a clearer picture of people’s mobility in the U.S. during the lockdown period, William Evans and Christopher Cronin, economics researchers at Notre Dame, gathered and analyzed all U.S. coronavirus-related state and local orders and compared them with geolocation data collected across 40 million cellular devices that have opted-in to location sharing services.

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At Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families, psychology experts address and study other aspects of health that contribute to healthy family life. Having to turn a physical space that is normally bustling with moms and dads and their children into a virtual environment that preserves research continuity and continues to provide services is not easy, but that’s exactly what the Shaw Center researchers and staff are doing. Several programs at the center have been converted to a telehealth model, including the child and family therapy clinic and a number of parenting programs such as the Notre Dame Families & Babies Study (ND-FABS). 

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In a first-of-its-kind study, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) today, economics professor Daniel Hungerman and graduate student Vivek Moorthy investigated the long-term effects of that momentous eco-celebration, studying how the event and the weather that day affected people’s attitudes toward conservation and their health years later.

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Notre Dame’s International Security Center (NDISC) has named James Webb its first distinguished fellow. Webb — a Vietnam Marine combat veteran, former senator, and former secretary of the Navy — is a national security and foreign policy specialist and the author of 10 books. “It is an honor and a distinct pleasure to be working with the leadership and students of Notre Dame,” Webb said. “I look forward to both teaching and learning through my interactions over the coming months.”

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A recent study, co-authored by a Notre Dame sociologist, shows how educators’ racial and gender biases affect their assessments of students’ academic skills based on noncognitive skills, which include behavior, class participation, self-discipline and interpersonal skills. Using a national dataset, Calvin Zimmermann examined how first-grade teachers’ perceptions of students’ approach to learning can affect how they rate those students’ academic skills. 

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A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage, from Notre Dame professor of political science Christina Wolbrecht, is the only complete source of information on how women have voted since suffrage through the present day. The professors’ research dispels the illusion of the homogenous “woman voter,” showing how changing political, social and economic realities swayed votes and how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press and scholars.

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Research led by William Evans, co-founder of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame, confirms that for every HUD-VASH voucher distributed, one fewer veteran is living on the streets.

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Stepan Family Associate Professor of Economics Rüdiger Bachmann at the University of Notre Dame and his co-authors studied the scandal and found that the fallout from Volkswagen’s wrongdoing cost other German car makers billions of dollars in sales.

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With the backdrop of the Great Recession in mind, but with the economy on the mend, the Federal Reserve launched a review in 2018 to closely examine U.S. monetary policy to see if it could be made more robust. Notre Dame associate professors of economics Cynthia Wu and Eric Sims were solicited to contribute a paper on assessing the agency’s tools for dealing with economic decline. They will present to Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and other high-level economists at a Fed conference in Chicago on June 4 and 5.

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How infants adjust in their first months of life depends on many factors, including what their mothers experienced while they are in utero — 1 in 4 women in the U.S. will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and that risk increases during pregnancy, but surprisingly few longitudinal studies have been conducted on the effects of IPV during pregnancy. William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Assistant Professor of Psychology Laura Miller-Graff led a novel study examining the role of breastfeeding as a potential protective factor against detrimental outcomes for infants associated with IPV during pregnancy. 

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The U.S. birth rate has been decreasing for the last decade, reaching a historic low in 2017. New research from a team of economists suggests that much of this decline is due to reductions in unintended births. Kasey Buckles, the Brian and Jeannelle Brady Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, and her co-authors found that the number of births that were likely unintended has fallen 16 percent since 2007. This drop accounts for more than a third of the overall decline in births in the U.S. over that period, and is driven by declines in births to young women.

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Homelessness in the U.S. is a persistent and complex problem. Each year more than 2.3 million people experience homelessness, 7.4 million people live “doubled up” with friends or family for economic reasons, and many more are on the brink of homelessness. A new study conducted by researchers at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities shows that emergency financial assistance for people facing homelessness not only reduces shelter entry, but also reduces criminal behavior.

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A more accurate measure of the poverty rate, based on how much people consume, highlights the dramatic decline in poverty over the past four decades, a fact that is missed by the official government poverty numbers. This can be visualized in a new poverty dashboard developed by professors James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame and Bruce Meyer of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

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In a first-of-its-kind study, Notre Dame anthropologist Lee Gettler and psychologist Patty Kuo focused on how dads’ biology around the birth of their children relates to their parenting down the road. Dads whose cortisol levels were elevated while they held their newborns on the day of their birth – either skin to skin or clothed – were more likely to be involved with indirect care and play with their infants in the first months of their lives.

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Vincent Phillip Muñoz is among the academics chosen to participate in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Forum on Free Speech in Higher Education on Monday (Sept. 17) in Washington, D.C.

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According to new research led by Notre Dame Associate Professor Guillermo Trejo, nations that adopt transitional justice measures, such as truth commissions and judicial prosecutions for past human rights violations, experience lower homicide rates and lower levels of criminal violence.

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