Seminar Series

Paul Shultz - Distributional Consequences of the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme: Income and Price Elasticities of Demand for Health Insurance

National health insurance is one means to provide health care. This paper describes the financing and receipt of the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) implemented in 2005. To distinguish those who register and are expected to benefit from the NHIS, and what reforms might broaden health care coverage, a 2009 representative Ghana Socio-Economic Panel Survey (GSEPS) is studied to determine program registration and current coverage.

Internet and Fertility - Francesco Billari, University of Oxford

The impact of technological change on family and fertility has focused on contraceptives (the pill), household appliances, medical progress. It is important to understand whether digitalization, and the spread of the Internet in particular, has an effect. Earlier evidence points to a potential effect on teenage fertility (and younger age fertility). Oxford University's Francesco Billari discusses how access to high-speed Internet has affected fertility at all ages.

Social Regulation of Gene Expression - Steve Cole, UCLA

Relationships between genes and social behavior have historically been viewed as a one-way street, with genes in control. Research in social genomics has begun to challenge this view by discovering broad alterations in the expression of genes across differing socio-environmental conditions. UCLA's Steve Cole summarizes the emerging field of social genomics and its efforts to identify the types of genes subject to social regulation, the psychological and biological signaling pathways mediating such effects, and the genetic polymorphisms that modify their impact across individuals.

Lawrence Berger "Household Debt and Children's Developmental Trajectories"

The economic crisis of 2008 called attention to the risks associated with rising household and consumer debt. Over the last forty years, inflation adjusted household debt has increased dramatically, and debt has become more difficult for American families to repay. The ability to borrow is a significant resource through which to invest in human capital, purchase goods and services, and smooth consumption.

Jay Pearson - Race/Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-Based Sample

Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. Using a community-based participatory research approach in a collaboration between social science researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 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.

Work, Family, Housing and Displacement: Migrants' Reasons for Moving, Socio-Demographic Selection and Residential Outcomes - Elizabeth Fussell, Brown University

Migration theories posit that processes selecting people into voluntary and involuntary migration differ, but without data sets that include measures of the causes of mobility there is little evidence demonstrating these selection effects. Brown's Elizabeth Fussell discusses how using The American Housing Survey, 1997-2013 provides a unique opportunity to examine selection effects associated with a variety of reported reasons for changing residences, and in doing so, to unify disparate fields of migration research. She reviews five mover types (employment related, housing-related, family-related, disaster-related, and other forced moves) and the residential outcomes for each of these mover types.

Edward Berchick - Change and stability in the association between mother’s education and subjective child health across 1965-2014 birth cohorts

Research on the maternal education gradient in child health generally views the strength of the gradient as fixed across the twentieth century. However, secular trends in health and education might have narrowed the education gradient across birth cohorts, whereas advantaged families’ engagement in a “reproduction project” marked by increased child-focused resource allocation might have offset these gains.

CANCELLED: Race/Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-Based Sample

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.

Redirected Lives: The Role of Women's Health in the Intergenerational Transmission of Socioeconomic Status

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.

Household Recombination, Retrospective Evaluation, and Educational Mobility over 40 Years

Analysis of the long term economic mobility using longitudinal household survey data requires an understanding of patterns of household recombination--that is the processes by which households divide and fuse over time. In this paper we examine, in particular, educational mobility at the household and village level in Matlab Bangladesh over a 40-year period.

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