Seminar Series

ABSTRACT : Evidence suggests that during periods of rising violence, innocent civilians pay a steep price. This paper investigates the impact of an amplified environment of violence on labor outcomes in the Mexican context. The Mexican Family Life Survey offers a unique opportunity to address this research question as the first follow-up was conducted between 2005 and 2006, a period of low levels of violence, and the second follow-up was performed from 2009 to 2012, during years of greatly elevated violence.

While all racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. exhibited an increase in longevity during the twentieth century, inequalities in survival remain. Among the three largest racial/ethnic groups, Hispanics have the highest life expectancy at birth, non-Hispanic blacks have the lowest, and non-Hispanic whites exhibit life expectancy between the two minority groups.

ABSTRACT : Studies since the late 1970s have shown how differential rates of mortality of members in a birth cohort affect the aggregate mortality rate. In short, as frailer members of a cohort are selected out, the aggregate mortality rate converges toward the rate of the more robust members remaining alive in the cohort. Thus, the aggregate mortality pattern may not look at all like the mortality pattern for any subpopulation within the larger population.

ABSTRACT : There continues to be substantial interest and debate regarding the health and mortality patterns of the Hispanic population in the United States. Such interest and debate has arisen because the health and mortality patterns of the Hispanic population appear to be quite favorable, while the socioeconomic status profile of this population is highly disadvantaged.

ABSTRACT : Our recent work on aging and health in France has highlighted an expansion of the years lived with disability within life expectancy in mid-adulthood. This unexpected trend went along with an increase in the sex differentials in disability-free life expectancy (DFLE). The female advantage in life expectancy is usually balanced by a larger share of unhealthy years, and this pattern has become more pronounced recently in France for the 50-65 age groups. This derives from differences in the type of diseases and risk factors men and women of these ages have been exposed.

Educational gradients in smoking are one of the deadliest examples of social disparities in health. But is this association between education and smoking casual? If it is, and we understood which aspects of schooling caused individuals not to smoke, then educational policy could have massive health dividends. In contrast, if the relationship between education and smoking is non-causal, then the observed gradients are instead explained by other characteristics that predict both statuses, making the disparities more difficult to address.

ABSTRACT : In age-structured two-sex population models, couple formation is modeled as a two-step process in which pairs first meet and then determine whether to match. The probability that a female of age i meets a male of age j depends on the relative numbers of such individuals, while the probability that this pair matches conditional on meeting -- the "force of attraction" for an ij pair -- is exogenously given and time independent. However, adopting a search-theoretic perspective, matching probabilities should also vary with marriage-market conditions.

Abstract : Influenza is a disease that is associated with both old-age mortality and with occasional severe episodes known as pandemics. Interestingly, however, during pandemics, although mortality increases, the age-mortality pattern becomes less flu-like, shifting younger. This talk will outline the virological and demographic reasons for these mortality age shifts during influenza pandemics.

ABSTRACT : Advanced parental ages are associated with a range of negative outcomes for the adult offspring, such as decreased health, cognitive ability, and life expectancy. The interpretation of these associations often relies on parental reproductive aging. We use large population-based samples from the U.S. and Sweden to analyze how alternative mechanisms - social selection, age at which the children lose their parents and improving macro conditions - influence the link between parental ages and offspring outcomes.

ABSTRACT : Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children - how they might arise and how they might be remediated. This analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health reveals another important mechanism in the determinants of educational attainment - differential returns to skills for children in different circumstances.