2025 | CESR in the News

Kyla Thomas and LABarometer were featured in Dornsife News showing that nearly half of Angelenos say their block has enough shade even though most live on tree-sparse streets.

CESR East’s Francisco Perez-Arce was featured in AARP, going over micro-changes in information policy wording can have measurable effects on people’s retirement decision-making.

Ritika Chaturvedi and company’s article on Fitbits got some traction on EurekAlert! and Bioengineer.org. 

Deborah Finkel was featured in NPR’s The Academic Minute, speakingon the effect of childhood money stress.

Deborah was also in Dornsife News, as they covered a multi-university twin study led in part by USC Dornsife researchers finding that accelerated biological aging, amplified by early-life disadvantage, is linked to cognitive decline later in life.

Zachary Wagner was featured in the VoxDev podcast, to discuss his paper showing that targeted interventions can reduce provider bias in family planning clinics and improve care for young women — an important step toward advancing global reproductive health and gender equity. This paper was also covered in AAAS and EurekAlert! in June 2025.

Livia Montana was quoted in Vox on the shuttering of DHS.

Without the data DHS provided, foreign aid becomes less effective, and less accountable “We have no way of externally or objectively estimating the positive impact that those [aid] programs are having, or negative,” said Livia Montana, the former deputy director of the DHS Program, who is now a survey director for the Understanding America Study at the University of Southern California.

Dornsife News covered the work of Titus Galama and the Center for the Study of Human Capital about their findings that for unemployed men, mental health improves significantly after 50 — not because of aging or more leisure time, but because retirement becomes socially acceptable.

Featured in Dornsife News, the latest USC Dornsife LABarometer survey finds Angelenos grappling with climate stress, doubting transit readiness for the Olympics and losing interest in electric vehicles.

Jeremy Burke was quoted in Yahoo! Finance report on the attentiveness and understanding of younger individuals on their retirement finances.

ABC News and Dornsife News covered work by Zachary Wagner and his study that finds even storms below hurricane strength significantly increase infant deaths in low- and middle-income countries, and not just for the reasons experts expected.

Dornsife News and Swedish newspaper Jönköpings-Posten featured the work of Deborah Finkel, which concludes that self-reported financial stress in both childhood and adulthood impact trajectories of change in depressive symptoms, anxiety, and loneliness in late adulthood. There is a surprising long-term effect of childhood even when adulthood financial strain is accounted for, and that positive experiences in adulthood can lessen impact of childhood strain.

Dornsife reported on the latest LABarometer survey and the assessment on how recent wildfires like the one in L.A. County’s Altadena neighborhood affected Angelenos based on their housing stability.

The LAist featured LABarometer’s work on the sheltering of wildfire evacuees following the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025.

The Jerusalem Post featured Tadeja Gracner’s work on British data shows that children conceived and born during a post-war period of sugar rationing were less likely to develop diabetes or high blood pressure later in life.