Seminar Series

Douglas Almond's use of the 1918 U.S. influenza pandemic as a natural experiment led to the seminal works on the subject of in utero health's impact on later life outcomes. The identification strength and clarity of his work, though, is driven by the inherent natural experiment supposition of random assignment. By using data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S. census, this study investigates this keystone assumption and shows that the families of the "treatment" cohort used by Douglas Almond were significantly less literate and economically prosperous than the families of the "control" group.

The share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since the early 1980s, but the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in these shifts by considering the effects of recent paternal and maternal incarceration on child homelessness using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study.

Most demographic research on intergenerational processes focuses on the associations between the numbers and characteristics of individuals in successive generations, and ignores multigenerational (Non-Markovian) aspects of intergenerational mobility. These aspects include both the net effects of grandparents and early ancestors on individuals and also other types of path-dependent sequences of family characteristics.

There is now consensus that concurrent partnerships increase transmission of infectious diseases in sparse networks -- like HIV in sexual partnership networks. Empirical research is accumulating that supports the hypothesis that concurrent sexual partnerships are one of the key drivers of the hyper-epidemics of HIV in some populations in Eastern and Southern Africa. The next step is intervention developmnet. This presentation reports on an NIH-funded pilot project of a concurrency reduction intervention.

Selection bias is a central problem for causal inference in the social sciences. Quite how central a problem it is, however, is often obscured by ambiguous terminology, needlessly technical presentations, and narrow rules of thumb. This paper uses directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to advance a precise yet intuitive global definition of endogenous selection bias and argue its theoretical and practical centrality for causal inference.

Scholars point to climate change, often in the form of more frequent and severe drought, as a potential driver of migration in the developing world, particularly in populations that rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. To date, however, there have been few large-scale, longitudinal studies that explore the relationship between climate change and migration. This study significantly extends current scholarship by evaluating distinctive effects of slow onset climate change and short-term extreme events upon different migration outcomes.

There is increasing interest in discovering mechanisms that mediate the effects of childhood stress on late-life disease morbidity and mortality. Previous studies have suggested one potential mechanism linking stress to cellular aging, disease, and mortality in humans: telomere erosion. We examined telomere erosion in relation to children's exposure to violence, a salient early-life stressor which has known long-term consequences for well-being and is a major public health and social-welfare problem.

Since the twilight of the 20th century, the era of a normative, discrete, and permanent retirement at age 65 has begun to wane. For many, it has been replaced with heterogeneous pathways to final retirement. In this emergent retirement life course, the relationships between work and health have important implications for the lives that older workers and retirees are able to live. One factor that may play an important role in this process is access to private insurance coverage.

This seminar will be co-presented by two Duke Doctoral students. Ryan Brown (Economics) will present his talk titled "The Intergenerational Impact of Terror: the Extended Reach of the 9/11 Tragedy", and Wendy Brynildsen (Sociology) will be presenting her talk "The Structure of Support: How Social Convoys Shape the Mental and Physical Health of U.S. Women and Men".

Prior estimates of the magnitude of the association between obesity and mortality have varied widely and have been a source of ongoing debates and controversies. Some prior studies have indicated that mortality attributable to obesity rivals that of cigarette smoking, while other research points toward a more modest role for obesity. In my talk, I will review prior controversies and discuss relevant methodological challenges pertinent to estimating obesity risks. I will present selected evidence from my prior work on this topic.