Seminar Series

Attitudes toward risk play an important role in economic behavior, but how these attitudes change following large disruptive events remains unclear. This is largely due to persistent problems of selective exposure, mortality, and migration in these contexts. This study explores the impact of exposure to an unanticipated natural disaster, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, on attitudes toward risk using exogenous variation in exposure for a sample representative of the pre-disaster population.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies suggest a rapid change in fertility preferences among young adults across sub-Saharan Africa. In this study, we shift the focus away from the established questions about fertility declines and stalled transitions to identify and examine an underexplored dimension along which fertility preferences vary within populations: flexibility. We use the Theory of Conjunctural Action (TCA) to motivate this exploration of flexibility schemas as a set of meaningful and measurable approaches to fertility.

ABSTRACT: Mexican-origin families make up the single biggest segment of the immigrant population of the U.S. As a group, they have high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage that combined with other characteristics of the U.S. receiving context, tend to block social mobility across generations.

ABSTRACT: Projections of countries' future populations, broken down by age and sex, are widely used for planning and research. They are mostly done deterministically, but there is a widespread need for probabilistic projections. I will describe a Bayesian statistical method for probabilistic population projections for all countries. These new methods have been used by the United Nations to produce their most recent population projections for all countries.

ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen dramatic changes in the debate about the impacts of weather and weather shocks on human migration. Earlier demographic work and research focusing on likely impacts of climate change suggested that climate shocks prompted out-migration as individuals faced income loss from failed crops or crop-related employment.

In recent years, technological change has presented a valuable opportunity for innovation in the measurement of cognitive skills in large population based samples. We developed a suite of laboratory-validated cognitive skills assessments administered on touch screen tablet PCs, and deployed them in a clinic-based sample of 130 children aged 7-12 in the city of Boston, and then on population-based samples comprising a total of about 5800 children in Peru and Ethiopia.

In 2013, scientists reported the first successful genome-wide association study of a social science outcome, educational attainment.Their analysis of millions of genetic variants in over 100,000 individuals revealed a molecular "blueprint" for success in schooling written in the alphabet of DNA. Rather than a "gene for education", this study revealed a continuum of genetic predisposition, with some individuals carrying very few attainment-associated variants, the bulk of the population carrying some, and a lucky few carrying many.

Drawing on cumulative theory, this study examines whether health limitations over the life course mediate the effects of parent socioeconomic status on the socioeconomic status of women. Using merged data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Mature Women and Young Women (n=1848), we estimate a multiple process growth curve model that allows us to model a chain of risk from early life to middle age.

Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. Using a community-based participatory research approach in collaboration between social researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multi-stage probability sample of three Detroit neighborhoods. We drew venous blood and measured Telomere Length (TL), an indicator of stress-mediated biological aging, linking respondents' TL to their community survey responses.

While much is known about patterns of racial academic achievement gaps at the national and state level, little is known about their patterns at smaller geographic scale. In this paper, we use new data to estimate racial achievement gaps in almost every metropolitan area and school district in the US with a significant population of black or Hispanic students.