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2026
Schwartz Rocha Beardall Jahn |
Heightened risk of fatal police violence in and around reservations for American Indian/Alaska Native peoples in the United States
PNAS Indigenous peoples face among the highest rates of fatal police violence in the US, but it is seldom studied in public health. We show that Native peoples living on reservations, or on the borders of reservations, are much more likely to be killed by police than Native peoples living farther away. Results demand public health investment and policy action in Indian Country. |
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2025
Nguyen Eberth Ezenwankwo Schwartz |
Housing Insecurity and Threats of Utility Shut‐Offs Among Cancer Survivors in the United States, BRFSS 2022–2023
CANCER MEDICINE We find that cancer patients face stark rates of housing and utility insecurity: 1 in 9 homeowners and nearly 2 in 5 renters in cancer treatment cannot pay their housing bills, risks that - for renters - do not resolve even once cancer treatment is over. |
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2025
Eastus Schnake-Mahl Chaparro Lê-Scherban Schwartz Kravitz Langellier |
The impact of state safety-net policies on perinatal birth outcomes by maternal race
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE More robust safety-net policies (states offering more benefits, greater eligibility, & less administrative burden) are associated with better birth outcomes for minoritized racial/ethnic groups. Less red tape in safety-net programs may improve infant health. Results are based on analyzing 12 years of data using an innovative new safety net robustness index. |
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2025
Schwartz Harriman Ramphal Slopen |
Eviction, inability to pay rent, and youth mental health: a fixed effects study
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY When families enter housing insecurity, their children's mental health and sleep quality decline. That's true when families are evicted (no surprise), but it's also true much earlier, when families just start being intermittently unable to pay their full rent. Findings are based on fixed effects models analyzing longitudinal data from nearly 12,000 children in the ABCD Study. |
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2025
Wang Schwartz Kim Hamad |
The Association of School Racial Segregation with Health Among U.S. Youths: A Nationwide Longitudinal Study
JOURNAL OF RACIAL & ETHNIC HEALTH DISPARITIES We find that increasing levels of anti-Black school segregation are linked to worsening health and smoking among Black, but not White, young people. We used a fixed effects approach in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. |
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2025
Schwartz Chu |
Evaluating housing quality policies in the United States: logistical and conceptual barriers
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY Chu and my last paper found that most existing policies governing housing quality (specifically, "implied warranties of habitability") are not improving renters' health. Here, we expand on why more proactive housing inspection programs might help - and why it is so difficult to evaluate them given the current policy landscape. |
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2025
Schwartz Chu |
Do laws protecting tenants’ health work?: Implied warranties of habitability and respiratory health
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY One of the core ways states protect tenants from unsafe living conditions is through "implied warranties of habitability," policies that hold landlords responsible for providing habitable housing. Using data from 10 states (1993-2018), we find that these policies are failing to protect renters' health at the population level, highlighting an urgent need for policy change. |
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2025
Ferguson Mehta Miramontes ... Schwartz |
Identifying and Addressing Housing Insecurity in Older Patients: Trends, Referrals, and Inequities in a California Medical System
THE GERONTOLOGIST Homelessness in older adults is rising, faster than any other age group. Little research has evaluated how healthcare systems are meeting that challenge. Using >1 million electronic health records from CA (2013-2022), we find only 7% of older adults identified by clinicians as housing insecure were referred to social workers. Latine and Asian older adults were much less likely to get a referral than their White counterparts. |
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2025
Kim Miramontes Mehta Schwartz et al. |
Extracting Housing and Food Insecurity Information From Clinical Notes Using cTAKES
HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH A major roadblock for studying social needs in healthcare is identifying which patients are experiencing social needs challenges. We assess the feasibility of one potential approach: applying natural language processing to electronic health records. |
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2025
Schnake-Mahl Diez Roux Bilal Schwartz Burris |
Rigorous policy measurement: causal inference challenges and opportunities
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY Epidemiologists are increasingly studying the health effects public policies. But a critical piece of that work has been under-examined: policy measurement. We lay out the practical issues it poses for causal inference, focusing on information bias and consistency. |
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2024
Kim Schwartz |
Foreclosure, memory decline, and dementia probability: a longitudinal cohort study
ALZHEIMER'S & DEMENTIA Foreclosure is associated with faster cognitive decline among middle-aged older adults, the equivalent of 3.7 additional years of cognitive aging over 10 years. Housing insecurity today may endanger population cognitive health tomorrow. |
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2024
Chiang Schwartz Hamad |
School segregation and health across racial groups: A life course study
J ADOLESC HEALTH On average, students in more segregated school districts had fewer exercise opportunities and poorer metabolic health long-term - a finding which held across racial groups, as long as they were attending a majority non-White school. But segregation was also associated with healthier smoking and drinking behaviors and better self-rated adult health for Black students, suggesting that segregated Black students' mutual support and lower exposure to peer-to-peer racism may foster health benefits. |
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2024
Schwartz Wang Kim Glymour White Collin Hamad |
Individual and regional differences in the effects of school racial segregation on Black students’ health
SSM - POPULATION HEALTH School segregation in the US has risen since the early 1990s, when the Supreme Court made it easier for districts to be released from integration orders. We find that this had a particularly damaging impact on Black students' health in the South, where segregation rebounded faster after orders lapsed; modestly higher incomes did not appear protective against these harms. |
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2024
Jahn Schwartz |
Who are the "police" in "police violence"?: Fatal violence by U.S. law enforcement agencies across levels of government
INJURY EPIDEMIOLOGY We estimated the proportion of police violence deaths in the U.S. (2013–2022) attributable to local, county, state, federal, or tribal police agencies. We find wide variation across states and racial/ethnic groups, suggesting that the shifts required to prevent fatal police violence will need to occur at multiple levels of government. |
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2024
Leifheit Schwartz Pollack Althoff Lê-Scherban Black Jennings |
Moving because of unaffordable housing and disrupted social safety net access among children
PEDIATRICS We find that children tend to lose access to critical social safety net programs - WIC, SNAP, and Medicaid - right when they need them most: when their families are forced to move because they cannot afford their housing. Action is needed to protect displaced children's safety net access, and to protect the housing of children whose safety net access is disrupted. |
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2023
Schwartz GL Leifheit KM Arcaya MC Keene DE |
Eviction as a community health exposure
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE Eviction hurts individuals' health - but it may also harm the health of evicted families' neighbors, family, and friends. We review the evidence for eviction as a community health exposure, including via changing local infectious disease ecology, eroding social cohesion, straining social networks, and increasing the psychological salience of eviction risk. |
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2023
Schwartz GL* Chiang AY* Wang G Kim MH White JS Hamad R * Co-first authors |
Testing mediating paths between school segregation and health: Evidence on peer prejudice and health behaviors
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE We critically examine several proposed pathways between school segregation and health. We find that, for Black students, higher school segregation is in fact associated with healthier peer behaviors and lower perceptions of peer prejudice in predominantly non-White schools. Peer prejudice and peer health behaviors are thus unlikely to mediate segregation's health harms for these students; more obvious mediators (e.g., educational disinvestment, harsher school discipline) are more likely the key mediating paths. |
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2023
Schwartz GL Glymour MM |
Bridging the divide: Tackling tensions between life-course epidemiology & causal inference
ANNUAL REVIEW OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY While the most rigorous causal inference methods can play a powerful role in life-course epidemiology, we explain why these methods aren't always easy to marry with life course epi's etiologic theories. We lay out ways the field can employ causal inference methods well - i.e., without losing critical insights about exposure durations, trajectories, & timing. |
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2023
Leifheit KM Schwartz GL |
Eviction & children's health: Investing in data, acting on what we know
JAMA NETWORK OPEN We argue public health is underinvesting in eviction data collection (nearly all existing research relies on 1 or 2 datasets), but point to places where we already have enough evidence to act (e.g., eviction driving preterm birth and low birthweight). |
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2022
Schwartz GL Jahn JL Geller A |
Policing sexuality: Sexual minority youth, police contact, and health inequity
SSM - POPULATION HEALTH We find that sexual minority youth in the US are more likely to be stopped by police, are stopped a greater number of times, and are stopped at younger ages than their straight peers. Inequities are particularly large among young sexual minority women and among youth who do not explicitly identify as LGB. |
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2022
Schwartz GL Jahn JL |
Disaggregating Asian American & Pacific Islander risk of fatal police violence
PLOS ONE Analyzing all known cases in which AAPI people were killed by police from 2013-2019, we read through thousands of news articles and applied surname algorithms to identify the national/ethnic background of decedents & calculate ethnicity-specific fatal police violence rates. Among other findings, Pacific Islanders faced high rates once disaggregated, on par with Black and Native Americans. |
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2022
Wang G Schwartz GL Kershaw KN McGowan C Kim MH Hamad R |
The association of residential racial segregation with health among U.S. children: A nationwide longitudinal study
SSM - POPULATION HEALTH We use individual fixed effects to examine childhood residential segregation & well-being. Surprisingly, we find harms of segregation for all children—Black & White—living in racially segregated neighborhoods targeted for anti-Black disinvestment & marginalization. |
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2022
Schwartz GL Wang G Kershaw KN McGowan C Kim MH Hamad R |
The long shadow of residential racial segregation: Associations between childhood residential segregation trajectories and young adult health among Black US Americans
HEALTH & PLACE Residential racial segregation is a key manifestation of anti-Black structural racism, putting communities at risk of disinvestment, over-policing, and predatory marketing. We show that Black children who live in highly segregated neighborhoods at high risk of disinvestment experience health disadvantages even years later, as young adults. |
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2022
Kim MH Schwartz GL White HS Glymour MM ... Hamad R |
School racial segregation and long-term cardiovascular health among Black adults in the US: A quasi-experimental study
PLOS MEDICINE Using a natural experiment, we show that higher school segregation worsens Black students’ health even years later when we followed up with them in adulthood, including poorer self-rated health and higher rates of binge drinking. |
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2022
Leifheit KM Schwartz GL Pollack CE Linton SL |
Building health equity through housing policies: critical reflections and future directions for research
JECH Housing is one of the most powerful - and underutilized - tools for improving population health. Through justice- and action-oriented research, health researchers can inform the development and implementation of housing policies that advance health equity. We offer a series of recommendations to better position our field to achieve this goal. |
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2022
Wang G Schwartz GL White JS Glymour MM ... Hamad R. |
Association of school racial segregation with the health of Black children: A quasi-experimental study
PEDIATRICS We use changes in desegregation court orders as an instrumental variable for school segregation, finding that "re-segregation" of school districts since the 1990s has harmed Black students' health. |
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2022
Schwartz GL* Feldman JM* Wang SS Glied SA * Co-first authors |
Eviction, healthcare utilization, and disenrollment among NYC Medicaid patients
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE Evicted Medicaid patients experienced impaired healthcare access - including being more likely to lose their Medicaid coverage - while generating more healthcare spending when they did access care. We combined a sequential target trial framework with coarsened exact matching. |
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2021
Leifheit KM Pollack CE Raifman JR Schwartz GL et al. |
Variation in state-level eviction moratorium protections and mental health among US adults during the COVID-19 pandemic
JAMA NETWORK OPEN Using a natural experimental design, we find that state eviction moratoria protected renters' mental health... but only if they intervened early in the eviction process, preventing eviction notices and filings (as opposed to, e.g., only preventing eviction enforcement). |
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2021
Schwartz GL Leifheit KM Chen JT Arcaya MC Berkman LF |
Childhood eviction and cognitive skills: Developmental timing-specific associations in an urban birth cohort
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE We find a concerning link between eviction & cognitive development, with children evicted in late elementary school scoring worse on 4 different cognitive tests than similar peers - the equivalent of up to a year of schooling. |
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2021
Chien YS Schwartz GL Huang L Kawachi I |
State LGBTQ policies and binge drinking among sexual minority youth in the U.S.: A multilevel analysis
SOCIAL PSYCHIATRY & PSYCHIATRIC EPIDEMIOLOGY Sexual minority (but not straight) adolescents' odds of binge drinking are lower in states with more queer-affirming social policies, a relationship that is particularly pronounced for policies that directly affect youth. |
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2021
Leifheit KM Linton SL Raifman J Schwartz GL Benfer E Zimmerman FJ Pollack C |
Expiring Eviction Moratoriums and COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY We use the quasi-random timing of when state eviction moratoriums expired to calculate their effects on COVID-19 cases and deaths. We estimate that state eviction moratoriums prevented hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 cases and tens of thousands of deaths by September 2020 alone. |
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2021
Smith LH Schwartz GL |
Mediating to Opportunity: The challenges of translating mediation estimands into policy recommendations
EPIDEMIOLOGY We comment on a paper by Rudolph et al. analyzing data from the Moving to Opportunity study. We provide a conceptual roadmap for researchers interested in using medication to understand why policy experiments had differential effects across subgroups. |
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2021
Schwartz GL Leifheit KM Berkman LF Chen JT Arcaya MC |
Health selection into eviction: Adverse birth outcomes and children’s risk of eviction through age 5
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY Children who were born low birthweight, preterm, or health conditions that required long hospital stays faced a higher risk of eviction during early childhood. We suggest that eviction and poor health may be cyclical, accumulating disadvantage. |
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2020
Leifheit KM Schwartz GL Pollack CE Edin KJ Black MM Jennings JM Althoff KN |
Severe housing inequality during pregnancy: Association with adverse birth and infant outcomes
IJERPH We show that mothers who experienced housing insecurity during pregnancy were more likely to give birth preterm, & their children were more likely to be underweight & to need NICU care. |
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2020
Schwartz GL Jahn JL |
Mapping fatal police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas: Overall rates and racial/ethnic inequities, 2013-2017
PLOS ONE One of Altmetric's 100 most discussed articles of 2020 across 20 disciplines We map overall rates of fatal police violence & racial inequities therein. The most lethal metros had rates 9 times those of the least lethal. While the South and West of the country had the highest rates overall, Black-White inequities were most severe in the Midwest and Northeast. |
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2020
Leifheit KM Schwartz GL Pollack CE Black MM Edin KJ Althoff KN Jennings JM |
Eviction in early childhood and neighborhood poverty, food security, and obesity in later childhood and adolescence: Evidence from a longitudinal birth cohort
SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE - POPULATION HEALTH Food insecurity was twice as common among 5 year-olds evicted in early childhood compared to similar controls, though they had similar rates of neighborhood poverty and obesity. |
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2019
Grindal T Schifter L Schwartz G Hehir T |
Racial differences in special education identification and placement: Evidence across three states
HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW In response to research suggesting that Black & Latinx students are only more likely to be identified as needing special education because they have higher poverty rates than White students, we show that special ed. disparities persist even within income groups - and indeed are concentrated among students whose families are not poor. Disparities were only present for disabilities defined subjectively. |
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2018
Arcaya MC Schwartz G Subramanian SV |
A multilevel modeling approach to understanding segregation in the United States
ENVIRONMENT & PLANNING B: URBAN ANALYTICS & CITY SCIENCE We develop new methods for characterizing patterns of residential segregation at multiple scales (city blocks, larger neighborhood tracts, etc.) and across metro areas with different proportions of minority residents, focusing on Black-non-Black segregation in the US. |
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2017
Schwartz G Grindal T Wilde P Klerman J Bartlett S |
Supermarket shopping and the food retail environment among SNAP participants
JOURNAL OF HUNGER AND ENVIRONMENTAL NUTRITION We show that SNAP participants' typical food shopping patterns are at odds with much of the food deserts literature: even people with "poor" geographic access to supermarkets spend the decisive majority of their benefits there (on average) - even if they live near convenience stores. |
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2016
Grindal T Wilde P Schwartz G Klerman J Bartlett S Berman D |
Does food retail access moderate the impact of fruit & vegetable incentives for SNAP participants?
FOOD POLICY Analyzing data on 10,000s of SNAP participants from a large RCT, we find that financial incentives to purchase fruits and vegetables are just as effective at increasing F&V consumption in food deserts as they are in areas with better access. |