Spring 2013

Note: Seminar will be in Soc / Psych 329 at 1:00pm on Friday.

ABSTRACT: For all climatic regions, mortality due to cold exceeds mortality due to heat. A separate line of research indicates that lifespan after age 50 depends on month of birth. This research as well as literature documenting developmental plasticity and culling in utero implies the hypothesis that ambient temperature during gestation may influence cold-related adult mortality. We use data on over 13,500 Swedes to test whether subjects whose mothers experienced unusually benign ambient temperatures during their gestation exhibit an elevated risk of cold-related mortality in adulthood.

This is a jointly sponsored event with the Carolina Population Center. The seminar will be held at the University of North Carolina. It will be held at the Pleasants Family Assembly Room at Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

ABSTRACT: Low income has long been associated with worse child and adult health for certain outcomes, but the extent and direction of causal association has been controversial, with many thorough analyses and reviews suggesting little to no true causal association. While progress on this topic has been made using some quasi-experimental studies and instrumental variables to estimate effects, many approaches have been limited in their generalizability to policy.

ABSTRACT: Poverty and altered planning horizons brought on by the HIV/AIDS epidemic can change individual discount rates, altering incentives to conserve natural resources. Using longitudinal data from household surveys in western Kenya, this paper estimate impacts of health status on labor productivity and discount rates. The findings indicate that household size and composition are predictors of whether the effect on productivity dominates the discount rate effect, or vice-versa.

ABSTRACT: It is well known that income inequality increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Reardon (2011) documents a correspondingly large increase - of close to .50 standard deviations - in the test score gap between children in low and high income families over the same period. This paper shifts the focus from achievement to attainment, as measured by years of completed schooling, and tracks changes in income inequality and educational attainment between children born into low- and high-income households in the U.S. between 1954 and 1985.

ABSTRACT: While the causes, transmission and consequences of material and social inequality are well studied in the social sciences, the ways in which people respond to inequality are less clear. As evolutionary social scientists we know that humans show a strong aversion to inequality, but we have little understanding of how individuals respond behaviourally to disparities in material, social and relational wealth.

ABSTRACT: To explain the pattern of labor migration to western nations research has examined supply side factors of migrant characteristics, their familial networks, and wage differentials of sending countries, these studies of immigration focus on periods of economic growth. However, my multi-site ethnography consisting of 97 interviews with U.S. guest workers, oil industry employers, and Indian labor brokers reveals that employer sponsored labor migration to the United States continues during the economic downturn.

ABSTRACT: This paper critically evaluates available data on divorce and the dissolution of cohabiting unions. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 are deeply flawed, and have greatly underestimated recent marital instability. These flawed data led many analysts to conclude that divorce risk has been stable or declining for the past three decades.

ABSTRACT: How does living in a violent environment "get into the minds" of children to affect them as they engage in daily life at home and in school? The research I will discuss develops new methods to identify the causal effect of exposure to incidents of extreme violence in children's neighborhoods. By exploiting the timing of events that occur in children's neighborhoods, this research examines how violence affects children's cognitive functioning, their ability to maintain attention and control impulses, and their performance in school.