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CPI Affiliated Faculty

 

Andrew Young School Affiliates

Karen Minyard, Director, Georgia Health Policy Center
Karen Minyard is an advocate for basic restructuring of local health care systems to focus on access to care and health status improvements. She serves as an officer on the founding board of the Community Health Leadership Network, a national partnership dedicated to helping communities achieve healthcare access, and has provided numerous consultations and presentations for groups and organizations that seek to build stronger health care systems. As director of the Georgia Health Policy Center, Minyard is charged with leading the policy, research, and technical assistance programs of the center. The program areas are concentrated in care at the end of life, child well-being, health philanthropy, rural health, and access to care for the uninsured.

Inas Rashad, Assistant Professor, Economics
Rashad is a NBER Faculty Research Fellow in the health economics program. Her current research pertaining to child health involves looking at the potential causal effect that advertising by fast-food restaurants might have on obesity in children and adolescents, and policy implications regarding corporate tax deductibility and restriction of fast-food advertising on television. In addition, she is focused on the possible effect that foods that have high glycemic indexes might have on the prevalence of Type II diabetes, once termed adult-onset diabetes but now afflicting numerous adolescents and even children. Rashad’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and she has written about childhood obesity in the Dallas Morning News.  Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Health Economics, Public Policy Research, the Public Interest, the Eastern Economic Journal, the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and Gender Issues.

Christine Roch, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Urban Studies
Roch conducts research in the areas of the areas of public policy, urban politics, and political participation. She is primarily interested in how citizens respond to incentives that are created by policy and institutions, and in the macro-level implications of their behavior for the design of policy and institutions. She also has a substantive interest in education policy. She has written articles examining how incentives created by changing the institutional arrangements of schools affect the behavior of parents. She has also written about the role of social networks as an intermediary between citizen and state in the context of tax reform. Most recently, she has conducted research on education finance reform in the states, as well as research on citizen satisfaction with the use of non-profits in the delivery of social services. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science.

Erdal Tekin, Assistant Professor, Economics
Tekin's current research focuses on the effects of welfare reform on single mothers' child care, employment, and welfare decisions. His other interests include the economic determinants of juvenile crime, the demand for medical care in developing countries, and the determinants of child care subsidy receipt. His work has received funding from the Child Care Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He is a research affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany.

Eric Twombly, Associate Professor, Public Administration and Urban Studies
Twombly is a national expert on social service provision by community-based, nonprofit organizations and wage setting in the nonprofit sector. He has also written widely on the determinants of charitable giving in metropolitan areas, the fiscal capacity of nonprofits, and the ability of advocates to improve worker compensation in the child care industry. Focusing specifically on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, he recently completed a multiyear assessment of child services and a study of the economic activity of the region’s nonprofit sector. Prior to joining the faculty of Georgia State University, Twombly was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. He received his doctorate in public policy from the George Washington University, where he also taught as an Assistant Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and Public Administration.

Mary Beth Walker, Associate Professor, Economics
Walker's research and teaching interests are in spatial econometrics and some semi-parametric estimation and testing. She has worked on applications in a variety of fields, including taxation issues, education, and health care utilization. In addition to her academic research, she has participated in some international public finance work and consulted for AT&T and Bell South. She has published numerous articles in such journals as Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Urban Economics and the National Tax Journal.

Sally Wallace, Professor Economics
Wallace focuses her professional career on teaching, conducting research, and advising on fiscal policy and the interaction of demographic changes on government’s fiscal stance. Prior to her appointment at the Andrew Young School, she was a fiscal economist for the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis (OTA), and specialized in the analysis of individual income tax and savings issues, pension plans, long-term health care financing, and employee benefits and compensation.   She has served as resident Chief-of-Party for the GSU Fiscal Reform Project in the Russian Federation (USAID funded) and as the co-director of the Jamaica Fiscal Reform Project (funded by the Jamaican Government and the Asian Development Bank). As Associate Director of the Fiscal Research Center she is responsible for overseeing publications of a wide range of public expenditure and revenue issues as well as advising the state of Georgia on fiscal matters. She worked as co-investigator and principle author on The Costs of Teen Pregnancy in Georgia, and is has focused recent research on short and long-run impacts of teen births and the impacts of public policies on those outcomes.

 

Georgia State University Affiliates

Christopher Henrich, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Prof. Henrich’s interests focus on contextual factors that influence children’s school adjustment. He is researching an array of factors - including neighborhood violence, parent involvement, peer groups and motivational orientation - and how they interact in influencing children’s academic and behavioral adjustment at school. He is particularly interested in school adjustment over key educational transitions (e.g., from preschool to elementary school, and from elementary school to middle school) and in at risk populations, such as children in poverty and/or with developmental disabilities. He has been working with colleagues at the Yale Center in Child Development and Social Policy on a national evaluation of the Schools of the 21st Century and he is also evaluating the 21st Century Community Learning Center after-school programs in Kansas City, MO. More information can be found on his website: www2.gsu.edu/~wwwpsy/faculty/henrich.htm.

Some of his recent publications include:

  • Henrich, C.C., & Blackman-Jones, R. (2006) "Parent involvement in preschool," chapter in E. F. Zigler, W. Gilliam, and S. M. Jones, et al. (Eds.) A vision for universal preschool education, New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Henrich, C.C. (2004). "Head Start as a national laboratory," chapter in E.F. Zigler & S. Styfco (Eds.) The Head Start debates, Towson, MD: Brookes Publishing.
  • Henrich, C.C., Ginicola, M.M., & Finn-Stevenson, M. (in press). The School of the 21st Century is making a difference: Findings from two research studies. New Haven, CT: YaleZiglerCenter in Child Development and Social Policy.

Gabriel P. Kuperminc, Associate Professor of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Dr. Kuperminc received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Virginia in 1994. His research program focuses on individual, family, school, and community factors that contribute to resilience among ethnic and cultural minority youth. His recent research on the experiences of Latino adolescents from immigrant families has found that recent immigrants differ from immigrants who arrived in the U.S. early in their lives in their use of parental and school resources to support school success. A key focus of his current work examines how young people’s family responsibilities contribute to academic achievement and psychosocial functioning.

He is currently working on research focused on identifying factors that help promote social adjustment and school success among immigrant Latino adolescents. The longitudinal study of 200 young adolescents and their families using questionnaire and ethnographic methods is enabling construction and examination of an ecological model of social adjustment and school success. This work is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. More information can be found on his website: www2.gsu.edu/~wwwpsy/faculty/kuperminc.htm.

Some of his recent publications include:

  • Jurkovic, G.J, Kuperminc, G.P., Sarac, T., & Weisshaar, D. (in press). "Role of filial responsibility in the post-war adjustment of Bosnian young adolescents," Journal of Emotional Abuse.
  • Karcher, M. J., Kuperminc, G. P., Portwood, S. G., Sipe, C. L., & Taylor, A. S. (in press). "Mentoring programs: A typology to inform program development, research, and evaluation," Journal of Community Psychology.
  • Kuperminc, G.P., and Brookmeyer, K.A. (in press). "Developmental psychopathology," In R. Ammerman (Ed.), Comprehensive Handbook of Personality and Psychopathology, Vol. III, Part 1, Chapter 8, New York: Wiley.
  • Priel, B., Besser, A, Waniel, A., Yonas-Segal, M, and Kuperminc, G.P. (in press). "Interpersonal and intrapersonal processes in the formation of maternal representations in middle childhood: Review, new findings, and future directions," Israel Journal of Psychiatry.

Dr. William Custer, Associate Professor, Institute of Health Administration, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University
Dr. Custer's research has investigated a wide range of topics including the sources of health insurance coverage, employment-based health insurance, health plan cost management initiatives, and health insurance regulation. He has also conducted evaluations of health care delivery initiatives for the uninsured measuring outcomes and patent satisfaction. He serves as the Director of the Center for Health Services Research. 

Publications related to health care and families include:

  • Custer, William S., and Pat Ketsche. "The Effect of Marginal Tax Rate on the Probability of Employment Based Insurance by Risk Group," Health Services Research, Vol. 35, No.1, Part II.
  • Custer, William S., Charles Kahn and Tom Wildsmith. "The Role of Employment-Based Health Insurance in the American Health Care Financing System," Health Affairs.
  • Custer, William S., Sajak K. Chattopadhyay, H. Irene Hall and Rebecca B. Wolf. "Sources of Health Insurance in the U.S.: Analysis of State Level Data and Implications for Public Health Programs," Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Vol. 5, No. 3.