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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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