Seminar Series

Elizabeth Bruch discusses how she applied rich activity data from a large, U.S. online dating site to examine how population composition interacts with mate-seeking behavior to shape men and women's romantic outcomes. She also reviews how local markets shape dating experiences both directly, by constraining the type and number of people one is exposed to, and indirectly, through the dynamic interplay between human behavior and experience.

Duke University’s Scott Lynch discusses "progressive mediation,” a theory that suggests the extent to which childhood SES exerts an independent influence on adult health depends on the seriousness of the health outcome being considered. Lynch posits that childhood status can have strong residual influences on lesser health conditions and precursors to more serious conditions, while having weak, or no, residual influences on more serious health conditions.

Paul Hooper discusses how his own unique model of evolutionary intergenerational transfers is also broadly relevant for understanding the evolution of human life histories, including longevity, length of dependence, age-schedule of fertility and demographic transitions.

Stanford’s Jamie Jones lays out the key features of the human life cycle and their relationship with a bet-hedging reproductive strategy. He discusses demographic methods he’s developed to measure life-history trade-offs, and discusses the possibilities of extending these to understanding the selective consequences of economic decisions more generally.

Daniel Adkins examines the influence of physical illness on sexual risk-taking behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood, both directly and through moderation of the impact of social disadvantage. He looks at the positive effects for social disadvantage and physical illness on sexual risk behavior—consistent with the development of fast life history behavioral strategies—among adolescents facing greater life adversity.

With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Sonaldi Desai discusses how the rise in hypogamous marriage by education paradoxically reflects how deep-rooted gender scripts in India--and other salient social boundaries such as caste, religion, and family socioeconomic status--are much more difficult to cross.

Maria Glymour discusses the challenges of identifying modifiable causes of dementia because of the ambiguity in the outcome definition and the long and insidious onset of disease. She posits that many of the risk factors identified in observational epidemiology are correlates of childhood development, rather than causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. She discusses the necessity of finding novel study designs that circumvent the measurement and confounding biases intrinsic to research on dementia.

The University of Michigan's Tyler McCormick discusses his recent methodological work on verbal autopsies. He also reviews his ongoing efforts to integrate verbal autopsies in settings with partial coverage vital registration systems using an open source software platform designed to integrate with existing verbal autopsy & vital registration data infrastructures.

The renewed interest by the economic literature in the effect of birth order on children's outcomes has neglected trust as a long-term output of familial environment. Duke University’s Pierligi Conzo discusses how differences in the order of birth predict heterogeneous self-reported trust levels in Britain. Conzo looks at how psychology, economics and sociology help explain the relationship between birth order and trust.

Sex differences in human mortality and health are widely documented in both low and high income countries. In this talk, Michael Gurven assesses sex differences in adult health and physical condition among small-scale, natural fertility populations of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists like the Tisane Amerindians, looking at the effects of reproductive intensity on the female health of this population.