(joint work with Jennifer Beam Dowd)We proceed to analyze relationships between individuals' health status in 2006 on the one hand, and the run-up in housing values in their communities over the previous decade or more.
This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between education and early fertility in a developing country. We exploit experimental variation in the cost of education for a cohort of 18,000 students in Western Kenya. In 163 schools randomly selected from among 328, students enrolled in grade 6 at baseline (2003) received free uniforms for the last three years of primary schools (from 2003 to 2005).
This study challenges the conventional wisdom that attributes fertility and its local variation in China as functions of government's birth planning policy. The study compares fertility in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two of the most developed provinces in China, to examine the relationship between socioeconomic development and low fertility in a global context.
The first project develops and implements an innovative method of measuring quality of care in a developing country context by using Simulated Standardized Patients. The second project is a recently funded impact evaluation of state-run voucher programs for obstetric care in India.
While socioeconomic gradients in health are well established, the biological mechanisms underlying these associations are not well understood. This talk will provide an overview of recent work investigating how latent infections may link social factors, stress, and disease.
Respondent-Driven Sampling is an innovative sampling technique that has recently gained considerable popularity as a method for studying "hidden" and "hard-to-reach" populations. Furthermore, the RDS methodology comes with strategies that, it is claimed, make it possible to compute estimates of population-level characteristics and for constructing confidence intervals for such estimates. Yet despite the widespread use of RDS, there remain serious questions about the statistical validity of the methodology.
The pace of aging in human societies has been of considerable interest to scientists and social scientists, and although some captive animal models for aging have been developed, no comprehensive studies of aging in wild animals have ever been conducted. Here we use data for both sexes from a 37-year longitudinal study of a wild baboon population to document patterns aging and place them within a life history context for this species, a primate relative of humans that evolved in the same savannah habitat as humans did.
We studied the relationship between early life socioeconomic status, household structure and adult all cause and cause-specific mortality in Finland among cohorts born in 1936-1950. We found significant associations between early life social and family conditions on all cause mortality as well as mortality from cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer and alcohol related diseases, accidents and violence, with protective effects of higher childhood SES varying between 10% and 30%.
DuPRI Seminar Kick-Off. Reception to announce upcoming seminars which will allow the Duke community to hear cutting edge research from renowned scholars and will serve as a forum for interdisciplinary exchanges.
This paper tests an insider-outsider model of harassment and involuntary unemployment.We exploit random assignment of appellate judges to three-judge panels and the fact that ajudge's gender and party of appointment predict outcomes in sexual harassment litigation todemonstrate a causal relationship between appellate decisions creating precedent in sexualharassment law and subsequent labor market outcomes.