The View from Here 1.23.19 (Links to an external site)

Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Associate Dean for Policy Initiatives and professor at the Brown School, recently represented Washington University in St. Louis at the University Social Responsibility Summit, co-hosted by the University of Haifa, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Niemeyer, K.

Hope You Aren’t Counting on Getting a Tax Refund This Winter (Links to an external site)

While the Trump administration has pledged that the Internal Revenue Service will still issue tax refunds, recent changes to the tax code will make that promise difficult to keep, especially with regard to these critical refunds. As the shutdown stretches on, people who depend on the EITC for relief may face serious hardship. Capps, K.

Health insurance or house payments? Obamacare means many poor Americans are able to pay their rent and mortgages on time by reducing health care costs, study shows (Links to an external site)

Researchers from University of Colorado at Boulder and Washington University in St. Louis analyzed three years of tax data and survey responses from 15,000 people to test the effect of having health insurance among low-income Americans. They found that low-income people who purchased health care through an Obamacare marketplace were 25 percent less likely than poor Americans without health insurance to miss housing payments. Bauman, V.

Five things to know about Financial Wellness Programs (Links to an external site)

According to a 2017 survey by benefits consultants Alight Solutions, almost 25 percent of employers have a financial wellness program in place, and almost half are in the process of creating one. Some three out of four firms with more than 10,000 employees now offer a financial wellness program, according to a recent study by the Employee Benefits Research Institute. Wasik, J.

Test the Psychology behind Food Indulgences: How We Trick Ourselves into Thinking Overeating Is Fine and That We’ll Bounce Back Quickly (Links to an external site)

New research from the Duke researchers at the Centene Center for Health Transformation™, published this month in the journal Appetite, explains how our lay beliefs, or naïve models, lead us to faulty assumptions about how our “dietary splurges” impact our weight, resulting in a lack of compensation following these indulgences and self-serving biases.

Growing old is nice, but boy is it costly (Links to an external site)

Half of Americans have no retirement savings, according to a Brookings Institution article of three years ago. Hasty reactions to market fluctuations result in escalating debt, according to Michael Grinstein-Weiss, associate professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis and associate director of the Center for Social Development. Shea-Taylor, B.

Israel’s First Social Impact Nudgeathon (Links to an external site)

The study of our own irrationality is called Behavioral Economics. And, thanks to Professors Dan Ariely and Michal Grinstein-Weiss, we held the first-ever social impact Nudgeathon at JDC Israel last week to make sure JDC Israel’s critical programs factor in the inherent irrationality of human decision making. Fishman, O.