Seminar Series

The Global Health Initiative (GHI), President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) and other global health programs are putting increasing emphasis on evaluation and learning to ensure that investments in global health are effective and achieve desired outcomes. At the same time, there is a growing debate in the evaluation literature on the most appropriate methods to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of health interventions in real world situations.

This paper tests an insider-outsider model of harassment and involuntary unemployment.We exploit random assignment of appellate judges to three-judge panels and the fact that ajudge's gender and party of appointment predict outcomes in sexual harassment litigation todemonstrate a causal relationship between appellate decisions creating precedent in sexualharassment law and subsequent labor market outcomes.

The pace of aging in human societies has been of considerable interest to scientists and social scientists, and although some captive animal models for aging have been developed, no comprehensive studies of aging in wild animals have ever been conducted. Here we use data for both sexes from a 37-year longitudinal study of a wild baboon population to document patterns aging and place them within a life history context for this species, a primate relative of humans that evolved in the same savannah habitat as humans did.

Respondent-Driven Sampling is an innovative sampling technique that has recently gained considerable popularity as a method for studying "hidden" and "hard-to-reach" populations. Furthermore, the RDS methodology comes with strategies that, it is claimed, make it possible to compute estimates of population-level characteristics and for constructing confidence intervals for such estimates. Yet despite the widespread use of RDS, there remain serious questions about the statistical validity of the methodology.

The first project develops and implements an innovative method of measuring quality of care in a developing country context by using Simulated Standardized Patients. The second project is a recently funded impact evaluation of state-run voucher programs for obstetric care in India.

This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between education and early fertility in a developing country. We exploit experimental variation in the cost of education for a cohort of 18,000 students in Western Kenya. In 163 schools randomly selected from among 328, students enrolled in grade 6 at baseline (2003) received free uniforms for the last three years of primary schools (from 2003 to 2005).

(joint work with Jennifer Beam Dowd)We proceed to analyze relationships between individuals' health status in 2006 on the one hand, and the run-up in housing values in their communities over the previous decade or more.

Many studies have found a positive relationship between cognitive ability, as measured in childhood or youth, and subsequent survival, and several explanations of this have been offered, ranging from the idea that low ability is an indicator of adverse systemic events in infancy or childhood to the idea that high cognitive functioning is required continuously to maintain health and reduce threats to survival.

EXTENDED COHORT-COMPONENT APPROACH FOR HOUSEHOLDS PROJECTION AT SUB-NATIONAL LEVELS This paper discusses the five core ideas of the extended cohort-component method known as ProFamy for simultaneously forecasting of family households, living arrangements and population.

"The Great Migration and Mortality of African Americans" Two inextricably linked phenomena lie at the heart of African American social history in the twentieth century: The first is "black-white economic convergenc, that accompanied the decline in discriminatory barriers and narrowing of the black-white gap in human capital. The second is "the great migration" the movement of millions of African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest, and West. This talk will examine Black white differences in earnings within specific locations.