Incarceration research catalogues its direct negative impact on former inmates and their families, though the effects of punishment clearly spill over to affect broader economic and political institutions as well. To further expand the scope of incarceration research, this study examines spillover effects between state-level incarceration rates and the functioning of the U.S. health care system.
Hans-Peter Kohler, Ph.D. is currently the Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography in the Department of Sociology, and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research focuses on fertility and health in developing and developed countries. A key characteristic of this research is the attempt to integrate demographic, economic, sociological and biological approaches in empirical and theoretical models of demographic behavior.
This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social networks models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise in that it links identification analysis to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop a Bayes-Nash equilibrium analysis for interdependent decisions under incomplete information in networks that produces linear strategy profiles of the type conventionally used in empirical work and which nests linear social interactions models as a special case.
This paper describes how using a gene-environment interaction framework may allow us to understand why health policies often work on some people but not others. A motivating example focuses on tobacco taxation policies in the US. The reduction in tobacco use as a result of taxation has been considered one of the most important public health successes in the past century. However, individuals continue to smoke at high rates and there is evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the responses to taxation.
Rapid advances in technology and scientific methods stimulated by the sequencing of the human genome have yielded discoveries that begin to uncover the genetic roots of common chronic health conditions. The implications of these discoveries for population health science remain unclear. Three questions central to translating genetic discoveries to population health research are (1) What are the magnitudes of risks that can be predicted using genetic information? (2) Do genetics provide new information over and above family history?
The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health effort to test all tubewells in the country and convince nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free drinking water sources. According to numerous sources, the campaign was effective in leading the majority of households at risk of arsenic poisoning to abandon backyard wells in favor of more remote tubewells or surface water sources, a switch widely believed to have saved numerous lives.
A growing literature suggests that stressful events in pregnancy can have negative effects on birth outcomes. Some of the estimates in this literature may be affected by small samples, omitted variables, endogenous mobility in response to disasters, and errors in the measurement of gestation, as well as by a mechanical correlation between longer gestation and the probability of having been exposed. We use millions of individual birth records from Texas to examine the effects of exposure to hurricanes during pregnancy.