Spring 2012

Past macro-level research linking population and economic development has emphasized national averages. Studies in this vein focus on national fertility rates and age structure (on the population side) and average per capita incomes or national school enrollments for instance (on the economic side). As a complement to this literature, our research draws attention to population influences on economic differentiation, both within and between countries.

This presentation will focus on a program of research that seeks to identify and better understand the multiple biological pathways through which social factors impact on trajectories of aging. Major social factors of interest include the broad impact of socio-economic status as well as the influence of patterns of social interaction with others (including both the positive and negative features of such interactions and their respective impacts on physiology).

This paper analyzes the impact of baseline household income and scholastic ability on post-secondary enrollment in South Africa. Using longitudinal data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), we analyze the large racial gaps in the proportion of high school graduates who enroll in post-secondary education. Our results indicate that baseline income and ability (measured in CAPS¿ literacy and numeracy evaluation) are strong predictors of post-secondary enrollment and statistically account for all of the black-white difference in enrollment.

TBA

We have reserved the last DuPRI slot on Thursday, April 26 for a practice session for students presenting at PAA this year during the regular DuPRI time slot. We hope there will be a critical mass of faculty in addition to other students to provide feedback on the presentation. For all three students, this will be the first PAA presentation.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.