Research Library

This study finds that Maryland's all-payer model for healthcare comparatively lowered the risk of complications from surgery, as well as reducing increases in associated costs.

An emerging perspective in U.S. public discourse claims that a buildout of renewable electricity would exacerbate supply risks, mining intensity, and import dependence. This ScienceDirect article from fellow Jim Krane and graduate student Robert Idel contends the opposite is true, demonstrating how transitioning to renewables hugely reduces the materials, mining and political risk involved compared to coal.

It now seems technically feasible to culture human embryos beyond the “fourteen‐day limit,” which has the potential to increase scientific understanding of human development and perhaps improve infertility treatments. Robust stakeholder engagement preceded adoption of the fourteen‐day limit and should arguably be part of efforts to reassess it, write the authors.

Using religious political parties in Iran and Turkey as case studies, the authors argue that the parties are not passively constrained by religious doctrine. Rather, they actively and continually construct religious narratives that respond to their immediate threat perceptions and political environment. Read more at Political Science Quarterly.

In this study, the authors found that a parental history of ACEs can weaken protective factors — such as resilience and social connections — that could mitigate the risk of perpetuating the trauma in the next generation.  Children and Youth Services Review: http://bit.ly/2UmOH95

The relationship between ACE score and substance use, mental health and parenting competence among a sample of Latino caregivers at-risk for child maltreatment is studied. Journal of Child and Family Studies: http://bit.ly/2nVVaJW

On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein initiated what became one of the longest wars of the twentieth century — a war of attrition between Iran and Iraq that finally ended in August 1988. Fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar examines the domestic causes of the Iran–Iraq War, delving into secret discussions among Iranian political and military elites during the conflict, their analyses of their own performance on the battlefield, and their revealing public disputes and blame game decades later.

Drawing upon primary documents from various Iranian communists and Islamists, this research paper questions the conventional wisdom that the Islamists' takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 was a grassroots reaction to American policies. The author argues that competition between the Islamists and leftists instead may have been a key driver of the hostage crisis.

A relatively new set of financial services called “microfinance” provides what appears to be a sustainable way of supplying access to capital to the poor. This article provides a brief history of microfinance, discusses the ongoing integration of microfinance institutions into the global capital markets, and surveys the challenges that now confront these organizations in becoming sustainable enterprises with social as well as commercial objectives.