Seminar Series

ABSTRACT: Nonmedical exemptions from school-entry immunization mandates have increased dramatically in the past decade. In California, high exemption rates were implicated in the "Disneyland" measles outbreak late in 2014, and in response, the California legislature voted to eliminate nonmedical exemptions entirely. In a series of studies, I investigate the causes and consequences of California's nonmedical exemption rate, analyze and anticipate responses to legislative changes in the state, and assess the role of vaccine-related social norms within school communities. #4821

ABSTRACT: We study the effect of differences in payment frequencies (monthly and bimonthly) across two noncontributory pension programs in Yucatan, Mexico. Compared to the bimonthly program, the monthly program increased doctor visits, reduced the incidence of hunger spells and lessened the need for support from charities. Under the bimonthly program expenditures on food and beverages significantly decreased near the end of the pay-cycle, while in comparison with the monthly program expenditures on more expensive non-cereal food as well as ownership of durable goods are higher.

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.

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ABSTRACT: This talk explores various "non-conventional" predictors of short-term survival. Social scientists have been arguing that a simple question asking respondents to rate their overall health in several categories (a question often labeled "self-rated health") is a strong predictor of downstream health and survival. But can external assessors - such as physicians or interviewers - provide as good or perhaps better ratings than individuals themselves?

This study traces out the evolution of American marriage between 1960 and 2010. First, I attempt to reconcile conflicting conclusions in the literature about recent trends in marriage and divorce. I then develop and extend two-sex models of the marital life cycle to quantify how changes in marriage, divorce, mortality, assortative mating, and the education distribution have shaped marital life cycles over the past half-century.

Following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, #BlackLivesMatter exploded into the social media sphere. As evidence by protests and unrest in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD, the hashtag social movement to curtail racial profiling and police brutality is still progressing three year later. Social scientists, public health scholars, and activists have documented the severity of police brutality, particularly for Blacks and Latinos.

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.

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.

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.