Seminar Series

Martin Ruef examines how slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period, both at the macro-level - through the uneven distribution of the nonwhite population across regions, states, and counties - and at the micro-level - through the isolation of slaves and free people of color away from the residences of whites. Ruef draws the conclusion that institutional slavery played a critical part in concentrating African Americans within a subset of counties in the U.S. South while rendering them invisible to broad segments of the white populace.

More than 600,000 prisoners are released from U.S. prisons each year, and roughly one-half of these individuals are back in prison within just three year, creating a vicious cycle of recidivism. In this seminar, Kirk discusses the experimental housing mobility program for recently released prisoners, The Maryland Opportunities through Vouchers Experiment (MOVE). Kirk designed MOVE to test whether residential relocation far away from former neighborhoods can yield reductions in recidivism.

In this seminar, Filiz Garip discusses how homophily and consolidation allow researchers to capture the structural constraints to diffusion, and explains why some newly-emerging migrant communities eventually come to surpass historic migrant regions in levels of migration.

Today's college students are in an increasingly diverse society, yet the majority of students still live in segregated communities across the United States before moving to college. The incoming student’s college dormitory experience marks a potentially meaningful and naturally existing cross-group event. Gaither reviews her past work on cross-race roommates and the resulting positive outcomes of improved interracial behavior. She also discusses current work on whether having a randomly-assigned versus a self-selected roommate influences student diversity outcomes.

Combining a natural experiment and a panel survey, we examine the effect of prenatal exposure to stress on children's outcomes. We find persistent negative effects on cognition, executive function, and educational achievement. The negative effect is strong among children in poor families but non-existent among middle-class children. Stanford University's Florencia Torche discusses possible mechanisms for these negative effects.

Brown University's Anna Aizer discusses how the causal effect of being a child of a teen mother is much smaller than that implied by cross-sectional differences, but examines the remaining significant long-term, adverse consequences, especially for children born to the youngest teen mothers.

The World Bank's Owen Ozier discusses the negative relationship between prevalence of gender languages and women's labor force participation in India, as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa countries where indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender structure. In his talk, Ozier also looks at how educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages are gender languages

Syracuse's Jennifer Karas Montaz discusses how U.S. life expectancy is increasingly being shaped by where residents live and their level of education. She examines the importance of macro-level explanations, particularly U.S. state policies and decades of deregulation, and the devolution of political authority from federal to state levels—all contributing to widening inequalities in life expectancy.

A wide variety of models are applied to analyze longitudinal data. This seminar provides an overview of three popular ones: the latent growth curve (LGC), the autoregressive (AR), and the autoregressive latent trajectory (ALT) longitudinal models. The seminar presents each model and discusses their parameters and interpretation.