Francine D. Blau (ILR), Pamela Meyerhofer (Ph.D. PAM ’20), and Josefine Koebe (CPC affiliated ILR Visiting Scholar ’19) research and Econofact: Essential and Frontline workers in the Covid-19 Crisis was cited in “The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?” Read the article in the NY Times.
Nicolas Bottan (PAM) with Bridget Hoffmann and Diego Vera-Cossio published, “The unequal impact of the coronavirus pandemic: Evidence from seventeen developing countries” in Plos One.
Matt Hall (PAM) discussed populations in NYS with underlying health conditions and rates of COVID-19 infection in the article, “Cornell Researchers Predicted Virus Stronghold On Upstate Counties With Vulnerable Populations” at WICZ.
Erin McCauley (Ph.D. Candidate in SOC) with first author, Katherine Lemasters, Kathryn Nowotny, and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein published the article, “COVID-19 cases and testing in 53 prison systems” in Health and Justice.
Nicolas R. Ziebarth (PAM) and his research was cited in the article, “Paid Sick Leave Significantly Reduces COVID-19 Cases, Study Finds” in Huffpost and in Marketplace.
Stefan Pichler (KOF Institute at ETH Zurich) with Katherine Wen (Ph.D. Candidate in PAM) and Nicolas Ziebarth (PAM) published “COVID-19 Emergency Sick Leave Has Helped Flatten The Curve In The United States” in Health Affairs.
Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality
A unique new study by Thomas Lyttelton (Yale), Emma Zang (Yale), and Kelly Musick (PAM), Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality, was recently released by the Council on Contemporary Families, compares parents who were telecommuting before the pandemic and after. The good news? Telecommuting fathers do a lot more childcare than other fathers – enough more to actually even out their time with moms. The bad news? They don’t increase their daily housework at all, while telecommuting women increase theirs by almost 50 minutes. The really bad news? Telecommuting during the pandemic increases mothers’ depression and anxiety significantly more than working from a separate location. One conclusion the authors draw is that women benefit from the boundaries created by work away from home.
How has COVID-19 Affected the Daily Mobility Patterns and Health Outcomes of Urban Older Adults?
Erin York Cornwell (SOC), Kate Cagney (Chicago), and Christopher Browning (Ohio State University) recent work focused on if older adults who are racial and ethnic minorities, from lower SES households, or living in disadvantaged neighborhoods are less able to comply with social distancing recommendations. If so, do they suffer higher rates of infection and experience worse emotional and physical health outcomes? To answer these questions, this project will collect three waves of geotagged, smartphone-based data on 450 older adults from 10 racially and economically diverse neighborhoods during the pandemic, and link these data to earlier waves of data collected on the same respondents but before the pandemic.
Reopening New York – Data needs of Regional and County Health Planners
Expanding upon the web-based report on New York State’s county population vulnerability to COVID-19 disease, previously published by the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics (PAD) and the Cornell Population Center (CPC), Matthew Hall (CPC Director and Associate Professor, Policy Analysis and Management) and Warren Brown (PAD) project will collect data on workforce vulnerability and health care capacity. The researchers will canvass county and regional public health planning organizations to provide feedback at the initial and subsequent phases of the project’s online reporting. Funding for this project is through a Cornell Atkinson, COVID-19 grant.
COVID-19 Vulnerability Assessment
CPC demographers in the Program in Applied Demographics (PAD) work titled, Demographic and Health-Related Vulnerability for NYS Counties resulted in a rapid report and data tracking tool to better understand underlying demographic and health conditions of communities that may exacerbate challenges associated with COVID-19. Local planners, health departments, and community groups across NYS are utilizing these resources for better preparation. Warren Brown (PAD and FSRDC) and Matt Hall have shared this vulnerability assessment research with several NYS media outlets including WKBW Buffalo.
Cohabiting in the Time of Covid-19: The Good, the Bad, and the Need for Support
Sharon Sassler (PAM) with Amanda Miller (University of Indianapolis) explored the challenges for cohabitating couples in their report, Challenges Facing Cohabiting Couples Differ from those of Married Couples in this Crisis.
Read the full article in Council on Contemporary Families.
Mandated Paid Sick-Leave and COVID-19
Nicolas R. Ziebarth (PAM) and his colleagues using two independent data sets on flu outbreaks—one from Google and the other from the CDC—found in both cases, that places that imposed sick pay requirements reduced flu cases by about 10 percent or more. Based on the research, Ziebarth reports that “mandated sick pay would definitely slow down the spread of the disease, which is crucial in these times.” Read more in the Washington Post article.
Novel Dataset Reveals the Deepening Effects of COVID-19 on Inequality
Nicolas Bottan (PAM) with Bridget Hoffmann and Diego Vera-Cossio both from the Inter-American Development Bank determined that initial conclusions from their online survey show that the coronavirus pandemic is having unprecedented effects on the daily lives of citizens in Latin America and the Caribbean with especially dire impacts on lower income households that range from job and income losses to a lack of information on the disease itself. Read the full article at Inter-American Development Bank.
Course Enrollment Planning and COVID-19
Kim Weeden (SOC) and Benjamin Cornwell (SOC) explore enrollment networks in their paper The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. To slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, many universities shifted to online instruction and now face the question of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. Read the updated report.
Essential and Frontline Workers in the COVID-19 Crisis
Francine D. Blau (ILR), Josefine Koebe (Universität Hamburg) and Pamela Meyerhofer (Ph.D. Candidate PAM) analyzed the characteristics of essential workers, and the subcategory of this group, frontline workers. They found that the broader group of essential workers comprises a large share of the labor force and tends to mirror its demographic characteristics. In contrast, the narrower category of frontline workers is, on average, less educated, has lower wages, and has a higher representation of minorities. Read the Econofact report.
Impact of COVID-19 on Immigrant Populations
Matt Hall (PAM), Shannon Gleeson (ILR), and Filiz Garip (SOC) with Duke Population Researcher Center collaborators, Giovanna Merli, Gabriela Nagy Carrasquel, and Claire LeBarbenchon are studying the impact of COVID-19 on immigrant populations in the U.S. They plan to use a novel methodology techniques to sample respondents representative of first-generation Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh Durham area of North Carolina and a new sample of Mexican and Central American recent immigrants in the New York metropolitan area. The combined data will allow us to understand which immigrant groups have been hit hard by the COVID-19 outbreak, and in what ways. In both settings, we will also collect information about immigrants’ social and economic ties to their countries of origin, and thus explore how the ripple effects of the outbreak travel from one setting to another.
Fall 2020
Peter Enns (GOV) and Jonathon Schuldt (COMM) received an NSF rapid response grant for Understanding Increased Social Bias During the COVID-19 Crisis in the United States with their first publication in Medium.
Laura Giurge with V.K. Bohns (April 2020) wrote the op-ed, 3 Tips to Avoid WFH Burnout in Harvard Business Review.
Philipp Kircher (ILR) joint with Luiz Brotherhood, Cezar Santos and MichéleTertilt recently published An Economic Model of the Covid-19 Pandemic with Young and Old Agents: Behavior, Testing and Policies.
Kelly Musick (PAM) with Thomas Lyttelton (Yale) and Emma Zang (Yale) published Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality by the Council on Contemporary Families.
Anthony Ong (HD) with Tara L. Gruenewald (Chapman University) received funding from the Cornell Center for Social Sciences for Social Isolation, Loneliness, and Prosociality During COVID-19.
Qi Wang (HD) was awarded a grant from the Cornell Atkinson Center to study social distancing during COVID-19 and its relation to psychological well-being.
Erin York Cornwell (SOC), Kate Cagney (Chicago), and Christopher Browning (Ohio State University) received an NSF rapid response grant for their work, How has COVID-19 Affected the Daily Mobility Patterns and Health Outcomes of Urban Older Adults?.