Publications by authors named "Avi Feller"

Importance: Abortion bans may lead to births among those who are unable to overcome barriers to abortion. The population-level effects of these policies, particularly their unequal impacts across subpopulations in the US, remain unclear.

Objective: To assess heterogeneity in the association of abortion bans with changes in fertility in the US, within and across states.

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Importance: The impact of recent abortion bans on infant mortality is not fully understood. There is also limited evidence on how these bans may interact with long-standing racial and ethnic disparities in infant health.

Objective: To examine the association of abortion bans with changes in infant mortality and to compare this association in racial and ethnic groups based on analyses within and across states.

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Introduction: Assessing the impact of COVID-19 policy is critical for informing future policies. However, there are concerns about the overall strength of COVID-19 impact evaluation studies given the circumstances for evaluation and concerns about the publication environment.

Methods: We included studies that were primarily designed to estimate the quantitative impact of one or more implemented COVID-19 policies on direct SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 outcomes.

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Article Synopsis
  • Evaluating policy responses to COVID-19 is complicated due to the unique challenges posed by infectious diseases and the variety of interventions implemented.
  • This text outlines different methods for assessing policy impact on health outcomes, such as cross-sectional and time-series analyses.
  • It also highlights common violations of methodological assumptions in the context of COVID-19, providing tools for decision-makers and researchers to better interpret the evidence.
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To limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments across the world implemented extraordinary physical distancing policies, such as stay-at-home orders. Numerous studies aim to estimate the effects of these policies. Many statistical and econometric methods, such as difference-in-differences, leverage repeated measurements, and variation in timing to estimate policy effects, including in the COVID-19 context.

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Introduction: Assessing the impact of COVID-19 policy is critical for informing future policies. However, there are concerns about the overall strength of COVID-19 impact evaluation studies given the circumstances for evaluation and concerns about the publication environment. This study systematically reviewed the strength of evidence in the published COVID-19 policy impact evaluation literature.

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To limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments across the world implemented extraordinary physical distancing policies, such as stay-at-home orders, and numerous studies aim to estimate their effects. Many statistical and econometric methods, such as difference-in-differences, leverage repeated measurements and variation in timing to estimate policy effects, including in the COVID-19 context. While these methods are less common in epidemiology, epidemiologic researchers are well accustomed to handling similar complexities in studies of individual-level interventions.

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Student attendance is critical to educational success, and is increasingly the focus of educators, researchers and policymakers. We report the results of a randomized experiment examining interventions targeting student absenteeism. Parents of 28,080 high-risk students in grades kindergarten to 12th grade received one of three personalized information treatments repeatedly throughout the school year or received no additional information (control).

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Background: The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) was a 10 year, multisector, rural development project, initiated in 2005, operating across ten sites in ten sub-Saharan African countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this study, we aimed to estimate the project's impact, target attainment, and on-site spending.

Methods: In this endline evaluation of the MVP, we retrospectively selected comparison villages that best matched the project villages on possible confounding variables.

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People are exposed to exemplary peer performances often (and sometimes by design in interventions). In two studies, we showed that exposure to exemplary peer performances can undermine motivation and success by causing people to perceive that they cannot attain their peers' high levels of performance. It also causes de-identification with the relevant domain.

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Spatial relationships within the eukaryotic nucleus are essential for proper nuclear function. In Plasmodium falciparum, the repositioning of chromosomes has been implicated in the regulation of the expression of genes responsible for antigenic variation, and the formation of a single, peri-nuclear nucleolus results in the clustering of rDNA. Nevertheless, the precise spatial relationships between chromosomes remain poorly understood, because, until recently, techniques with sufficient resolution have been lacking.

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The combination therapy of the Artemisinin-derivative Artemether (ART) with Lumefantrine (LM) (Coartem®) is an important malaria treatment regimen in many endemic countries. Resistance to Artemisinin has already been reported, and it is feared that LM resistance (LMR) could also evolve quickly. Therefore molecular markers which can be used to track Coartem® efficacy are urgently needed.

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We have cultured Plasmodium falciparum directly from the blood of infected individuals to examine patterns of mature-stage gene expression in patient isolates. Analysis of the transcriptome of P. falciparum is complicated by the highly periodic nature of gene expression because small variations in the stage of parasite development between samples can lead to an apparent difference in gene expression values.

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