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International Money Fund: Are the tradeoffs fair and acceptable when it comes to population health?

Photo of International Monetary Fund lettering on side of building

A study published in World Development by three researchers affiliated with the Harvard Pop Center (former Bell Fellow Adel Daoud, faculty member S V Subramanian, and the 2017 recipient of the Sissela Bok Ethics and Population Research Prize Anders Herlitz, reviews already existing policy-evaluation studies, finding that International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies “on balance show that IMF policies, in their pursuit of macroeconomic improvement, frequently produce adverse effects on children’s…

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Which subpopulations are more susceptible to mental health issues after experiencing a disaster?

map of 2011 Great Earthquake

In this study authored by former Harvard Bell Fellow Adel Daoud, PhD, and our faculty affiliate Ichiro Kawachi, and their colleagues, a machine learning approach to parsing out differences in mental health problems after a disaster-related traumatic experience (in this case, older Japanese adults who lived in an area hard hit by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake) revealed that some subgroups experienced severe impacts. Those found to be most…

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Increasing mother’s education beyond compulsory 9 years decreases child malnutrition in conflict-ridden Nigeria

Head shot of Adel Daoud

Harvard Bell Fellow Adel Daoud, PhD, is an author on a study that has leveraged a machine-learning approach—Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART)—that confirms and refines earlier findings that maternal education decreases severe child undernutrition, even in an armed conflict environment.

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Recalibrating socio-ecological inquiry by recognizing dynamic interplay between scarcity, abundance and sufficiency

A study by Harvard Bell Fellow Adel Daoud, PhD, suggests that the benefits of socio-ecological inquiry could be expanded by better understanding the dynamic relationship between scarcity, abundance and sufficiency, as opposed to seeing them as distinct branches of inquiry.