Pardee RAND Graduate School students participate in many RAND research projects through their On-the-Job Training. These projects provide students with tremendous opportunities to publish their work in RAND reports and peer-reviewed journals. In fact, many of our students develop an impressive publications record during their tenure at Pardee RAND, which enables them to compete successfully for positions at universities and other research institutions.
Below is a list of publications that our students have recently authored or co-authored. The list provides an excellent illustration of the range of publications that our students have had a hand in developing.
This web-based tool is part of a quarterly series that draws from a variety of scientific resources to inform Chesapeake Bay Watershed policymakers, practitioners, residents, and community leaders on historical and projected future climate trends. An interactive tool shows projections of percentage change in freeze-thaw days to 2099.
Researchers are helping the U.S. Department of Homeland Security understand how social media might be better leveraged for situational awareness—particularly location information—in U.S. Coast Guard response operations.
Social media can enhance situational awareness in response operations, but using social media this way poses challenges. Researchers sought to contribute to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mission to ensure resilience to disasters by helping DHS understand whether and how social media might be better leveraged for such situational awareness. The primary focus of this research was on U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) response operations.
The authors examine scalable analytics to detect malign or subversive information efforts, using the 2018 World Cup as a case study. The report has operational relevance to the U.S. government. It may benefit both researchers interested in going beyond post hoc recognition of malign or subversive information campaigns to in-time detection and social media companies interested in preventing their platforms from being co-opted by malign actors.
U.S. Army North led Department of Defense support to civilian disaster-response operations in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. RAND was asked to answer a series of questions about that support, including about relationships among responding organizations and possible improvements in such things as speed of response and situational awareness.
To what degree is the suicide trend in the U.S. Army unique to that service, relative to what is observed in the general U.S. population? Researchers investigate how accounting for additional population risk factors beyond age and gender (race/ethnicity, time, marital status, and educational attainment) affects suicide rate differences between soldiers and a comparable subset of the general U.S. population.
This paper describes the methods that build on previous efforts by providing a detailed methodology that can be replicated in large metropolitan areas that have legalized the sale of cannabis.
In this report, the authors explore approaches for understanding, inventorying, and modeling cybersecurity implications of the rapid growth in drone usage, focusing specifically on current vulnerabilities and future trends. The authors propose conceptual approaches meant to enable the enumeration and categorization of drone-related cyber threats and explore some of the potential benefits and challenges of modeling the commercial drone threat.
The RAND Corporation and partners are carrying out a research effort to assess and prioritize technology needs across the criminal justice community. Since 2015, the Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative has published more than 20 reports identifying and prioritizing criminal justice needs for innovation. This product provides a database of all of the needs generated during the first five years of the Initiative.
In May 2019, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and the Shay Moral Injury Center at Volunteers of America hosted a three-day conference, "Moral Injury and Pathways to Recovery." RAND evaluated the reach and impact of the conference and its goals to deepen knowledge about moral injury and effective recovery strategies and to strengthen collaborative connections.
This Perspective examines the interests that inspire Russia's use of subversion, the means involved, and recent events that illustrate Russia's attempts at subversion. The authors propose ensuring that any responses to such actions are closely and clearly linked with particular acts of subversion, conducting additional research on what makes some Russian subversion effective, and improving rapid attribution of subversion.
In response to the rapid spread of disinformation online and as part of the RAND Corporation's Truth Decay initiative, RAND researchers worked to identify and characterize the universe of web-based tools targeted at online disinformation, focusing on those tools created by nonprofit or civil society organizations. This report serves as a companion to the already published web database, describing the methodology and the types of tools included.
In this Perspective, the authors review potential benefits and drawbacks of online outsourcing, including microwork and freelancing, with special reference to its potential for youth employment and poverty reduction in Indonesia. Although there are many constraints to the growth of online outsourcing, Indonesia's favorable business environment and large economy suggest that there is also significant potential for expansion of online outsourcing.
The authors of this report present new estimates of wage loss for California's injured workers in 2016–2017 and compare these estimates with trends before, during, and after the Great Recession. They also analyze trends for key subgroups of interest in the workers' compensation system, including analyses by receipt of indemnity benefits, industry, type of injury, and geographic region.
After a decade of focus on financial firms, new analysis using an innovative approach and new dataset shows that firms in a diverse range of sectors, such as technology and telecommunications, pose a systemic risk to the economy at large.
In this brief, RAND researchers, in support of Army efforts to provide the highest-quality behavioral health care possible, identify factors associated with changes in outcomes for soldiers who receive Army behavioral health specialty care.
This report identifies factors associated with changes in outcomes for soldiers who received Army behavioral health specialty care and provides recommendations to improve care and outcomes for posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. Analyses of 141 patient and treatment variables indicated that two treatment factors—therapeutic alliance and receipt of benzodiazepines—were associated with outcomes.
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are the most common type of occupational injury among firefighters, so there is considerable interest among policymakers and stakeholders about how best to monitor, prevent, and treat firefighter MSDs. The authors update analyses from a 2010 study on firefighters in California, considering the impacts on injured firefighters of recent workers' compensation reforms and the economic shocks of the late 2000s.
Researchers estimate average annual total costs of typical general and flag officers (G/FOs) as well as the annual total costs of specific G/FO positions in support of the Secretary of Defense's congressional reporting requirement. Estimated costs range from $270,000 for O-7 pay grades with no staff or travel to over $10 million for O-10 pay grades that receive continuous protection and must use government aircraft for official travel.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, significant attention was paid to systemic risk within heavily interconnected financial networks, but little attention was paid to systemic risks in the economy at large. The authors of this report address that gap, detailing efforts to gather large data sets on observed interfirm linkages, procedures to infer missing data on network linkages, and an approach to calibrate likely connections to financial data.
