Seminar Series

ABSTRACT : Studies since the late 1970s have shown how differential rates of mortality of members in a birth cohort affect the aggregate mortality rate. In short, as frailer members of a cohort are selected out, the aggregate mortality rate converges toward the rate of the more robust members remaining alive in the cohort. Thus, the aggregate mortality pattern may not look at all like the mortality pattern for any subpopulation within the larger population.

While all racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. exhibited an increase in longevity during the twentieth century, inequalities in survival remain. Among the three largest racial/ethnic groups, Hispanics have the highest life expectancy at birth, non-Hispanic blacks have the lowest, and non-Hispanic whites exhibit life expectancy between the two minority groups.

ABSTRACT : Evidence suggests that during periods of rising violence, innocent civilians pay a steep price. This paper investigates the impact of an amplified environment of violence on labor outcomes in the Mexican context. The Mexican Family Life Survey offers a unique opportunity to address this research question as the first follow-up was conducted between 2005 and 2006, a period of low levels of violence, and the second follow-up was performed from 2009 to 2012, during years of greatly elevated violence.

ABSTRACT : The growing economic resemblance of spouses has contributed to rising economic inequality among married couple households in the United States. Little is known, however, about why the association between spouses' earnings increased. Did it increase primarily because of increases in assortative mating or because of changes in the division of labor after marriage?

ABSTRACT : Most research on US intergenerational mobility (IGM) starts with an origin measure of SES in the parents' generation (e.g. those parents who were age 40 in 1960-1980) and then assesses the SES outcomes for their children when they reach a similar age. This process has limited use in establishing the connection between inequality and IGM as the children of these generations grew up in an era of relative equality, and the children who were born to higher inequality generations (say those born 1990-2005) have not yet grown up enough to assess adult SES and therefore IGM outcomes.

Abstract: It is sometimes suggested that infectious diseases are "solved problems" in the developed world. Yet at the same time hospital statistics report complex infections, known as sepsis, as the single most expensive (in aggregate) cause of hospitalization.

Obesity is generally thought of as a major cause of pre-mature mortality and is, furthermore, viewed as a significant threat to the long-standing secular decline in U.S. mortality. First, I will discuss the association of weight status and mortality in the general population and consider how this relationship has, perhaps, changed over time. Second, I will present findings from current work on the "obesity paradox", where it is hypothesized that obesity may actually confer a survival advantage, relative to being normal weight, once specific chronic conditions are established.

In this talk, I present recent primate and human evidence on the importance of investing in the early years to promote health across the lifecourse. First, I provide evidence based on a unique long-running experiment on rhesus monkeys which are randomly allocated at birth across three different rearing conditions: mother-rearing, peer-rearing and surrogate peer-rearing.

Tobacco consumption is seen as the predominant driver of both the trend and the extent of sex differences in life expectancy. We compare the impact of smoking to the effect of other non-biological factors to assess its significance.We apply standard demographic methods for the decomposition of the sex differences in life expectancy into fractions caused by biological factors, smoking, and other non-biological factors for 53 industrialized countries and the period 1950-2009.The trend of the sex gap can indeed be attributed to smoking in most populations of the western world.

A population's level of period life expectancy is a biased indicator of period mortality conditions, due to the existence of cohort effects and mortality selection. It is also an indicator that has little relevance for the experience of actual individuals. In this paper, we discuss Lagged Cohort Life Expectancy (LCLE), or the life expectancy for the cohort currently reaching its life expectancy. We argue that LCLE is a useful mortality measure that provides information about levels of longevity currently being reached by actual cohorts of individuals.