Seminar Series

ABSTRACT: Projections of countries' future populations, broken down by age and sex, are widely used for planning and research. They are mostly done deterministically, but there is a widespread need for probabilistic projections. I will describe a Bayesian statistical method for probabilistic population projections for all countries. These new methods have been used by the United Nations to produce their most recent population projections for all countries.

ABSTRACT: Mexican-origin families make up the single biggest segment of the immigrant population of the U.S. As a group, they have high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage that combined with other characteristics of the U.S. receiving context, tend to block social mobility across generations.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies suggest a rapid change in fertility preferences among young adults across sub-Saharan Africa. In this study, we shift the focus away from the established questions about fertility declines and stalled transitions to identify and examine an underexplored dimension along which fertility preferences vary within populations: flexibility. We use the Theory of Conjunctural Action (TCA) to motivate this exploration of flexibility schemas as a set of meaningful and measurable approaches to fertility.

Attitudes toward risk play an important role in economic behavior, but how these attitudes change following large disruptive events remains unclear. This is largely due to persistent problems of selective exposure, mortality, and migration in these contexts. This study explores the impact of exposure to an unanticipated natural disaster, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, on attitudes toward risk using exogenous variation in exposure for a sample representative of the pre-disaster population.

ABSTRACT: A broad literature in social psychology has established that respondents react negatively when women engage in traditionally masculine actions in the workplace (Heilman and Chen 2005; Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, and Tamkins 2004; Rudman and Glick 1999; Rudman 1998; Rudman and Glick 2001; Bowles, Babcock, and Lai 2006; Amanatullah and Morris 2010). This negative reaction is described as a "backlash effect." In this study, I test two hypotheses.

ABSTRACT:The contribution of preterm birth and birthweight extremes to a child's health risks, ranging from infant mortality to later onset diseases in adulthood, has been examined extensively. The direct causal relationship between gestational age, birthweight, and later life health has been questioned because they may be measures of confounding factors that are related both to birth characteristics and to later life health. With a few exceptions, this large body of work does not consider the patterns of birthweight and preterm births within a family.

ABSTRACT: Although climate-related extreme events---floods, rain-induced landslides, and droughts---are receiving increasing attention in the development and disaster risk-reduction communities, demographic analysis of the incidence and consequences of these events has remained very scarce indeed. In part this is because spatially-specific data are needed not only on where extreme events take place, but also on the demographic characteristics of those exposed to risk.

ABSTRACT: This presentation will discuss several studies examining the associations among life course socioeconomic indicators and health. Specifically, we will discuss how life course socioeconomic indicators influence cognitive function, metabolic conditions, infection and immune response using data from several cohort studies in the US.

ABSTRACT: In the social sciences, there is a longstanding tension between data collection methods that facilitate quantification and those that are open to unanticipated information. Advances in technology now enable new, hybrid methods that can combine some of the benefits of both approaches. Drawing inspiration both from online information aggregation systems like Wikipedia and from traditional survey research, we propose a new class of research instruments called wiki surveys.

ABSTRACT: Academic and policy literatures on intergenerational transmissions of poverty and inequality suggest that improving schooling attainment and income for parents in poor households will lessen poverty and inequality in their children's generation through increased human capital accumulated by their children. However, magnitudes of such effects are unknown.