Seminar Series

ABSTRACT: Academic and policy literatures on intergenerational transmissions of poverty and inequality suggest that improving schooling attainment and income for parents in poor households will lessen poverty and inequality in their children's generation through increased human capital accumulated by their children. However, magnitudes of such effects are unknown.

Radical changes in the nature of romantic relationships are reflected in the decoupling of what were once considered "marital behaviors" from the institution of marriage. Cohabitors can engage in many of the same experiences of shared living, such as economies of scale, risk pooling, production of relationship-specific capital, and joint consumption, without marrying. This study examines whether financial attributes of shared living are associated with transitions to marriage or separation among current cohabitors.

This paper examines whether associations between personality and attained status are socially contingent such that valued personality characteristics are stronger predictors of attainments at lower levels of parental education (the resource substitution hypothesis) but such characteristics are less likely among the children of less educated parents (the structural amplification hypothesis).

Compared to the US-born, Black immigrants have higher child poverty rates despite their comparatively higher levels of schooling. This disadvantage is inconsistent with human-capital theory and is unseen among other immigrant racial groups. This research examines whether this inconsistency is explained by the influence of parental education-occupation mismatch status on child poverty. It shows that the parents of Black children in immigrant families are considerably more likely to be over-educated, or have more schooling for their jobs, than their counterparts in US-born families.

A population's level of period life expectancy is a biased indicator of period mortality conditions, due to the existence of cohort effects and mortality selection. It is also an indicator that has little relevance for the experience of actual individuals. In this paper, we discuss Lagged Cohort Life Expectancy (LCLE), or the life expectancy for the cohort currently reaching its life expectancy. We argue that LCLE is a useful mortality measure that provides information about levels of longevity currently being reached by actual cohorts of individuals.

Tobacco consumption is seen as the predominant driver of both the trend and the extent of sex differences in life expectancy. We compare the impact of smoking to the effect of other non-biological factors to assess its significance.We apply standard demographic methods for the decomposition of the sex differences in life expectancy into fractions caused by biological factors, smoking, and other non-biological factors for 53 industrialized countries and the period 1950-2009.The trend of the sex gap can indeed be attributed to smoking in most populations of the western world.

In this talk, I present recent primate and human evidence on the importance of investing in the early years to promote health across the lifecourse. First, I provide evidence based on a unique long-running experiment on rhesus monkeys which are randomly allocated at birth across three different rearing conditions: mother-rearing, peer-rearing and surrogate peer-rearing.

Obesity is generally thought of as a major cause of pre-mature mortality and is, furthermore, viewed as a significant threat to the long-standing secular decline in U.S. mortality. First, I will discuss the association of weight status and mortality in the general population and consider how this relationship has, perhaps, changed over time. Second, I will present findings from current work on the "obesity paradox", where it is hypothesized that obesity may actually confer a survival advantage, relative to being normal weight, once specific chronic conditions are established.

Abstract: It is sometimes suggested that infectious diseases are "solved problems" in the developed world. Yet at the same time hospital statistics report complex infections, known as sepsis, as the single most expensive (in aggregate) cause of hospitalization.

ABSTRACT : Most research on US intergenerational mobility (IGM) starts with an origin measure of SES in the parents' generation (e.g. those parents who were age 40 in 1960-1980) and then assesses the SES outcomes for their children when they reach a similar age. This process has limited use in establishing the connection between inequality and IGM as the children of these generations grew up in an era of relative equality, and the children who were born to higher inequality generations (say those born 1990-2005) have not yet grown up enough to assess adult SES and therefore IGM outcomes.