Spring 2017

Research on the environmental dimensions of migration has burgeoned over the past several years. Prof. Hunter provides an overview of this work, with specific examples from her own collaborative scholarship on migration within, and from, Mexico. She will also offer a brief glimpse into her research on natural resource availability and livelihood migration from the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural South Africa. In this presentation, she’ll also highlight the challenges facing migration-environment scholars and pathways forward.

Smoking and obesity are the top-two leading causes of preventable disease and death in the US and significant sources of the substantial disparities in health between socioeconomic status (SES) groups. Pietro Biroli discusses his recent study that constructed poligenic risk scores (PGS) to evaluate whether these genetic variants mediate the effects of childhood SES in determining adult risky health behaviors. He also reviews the empirical results of the study through the lenses of a canonical economic model of health formation and addiction, extended to include genetic heterogeneity.

In this talk, Michael Kobor highlights the emerging role of epigenetic modifications at the interface between environments and the genome. Drawing on a large interdisciplinary research network of human population studies with partners from child development, psychology, psychiatry, and epidemiology, Kobor discusses how early life adversities such as poverty and family stress can ”get under the skin” to affect health and behavior across the lifespan.

Understanding demographic responses to climate-related natural disasters has garnered sustained attention ever since the 2007 IPCC report. There is the challenge of accounting for the entire complexity of human behavioral and institutional responses. The University of Washington’s Sara Curran discusses how her recent study produced models that can be used to address some of the challenges facing policy makers and researchers seeking to understand the complexities of human responses to climate change.

It is now recognized among many scholars that most socio-behavioral outcomes evince both strong genetic and environmental components that contribute to their variation in natural populations. The next step in reconciling nature and nurture, then, is to properly model gene-environment interplay. Princeton’s Dalton Conley discuss a series of attempts to apply econometric methods for causal inference--namely, a natural experiment framework--to genome-wide data available in social surveys to model gene-by-environment interaction effects. He also reviews alternatives to conceptualizing and measuring genetic regulation of plasticity that may inform GxE models.

For children, parental separation is often accompanied by an increased risk of poverty and deteriorating living standards. These effects have been studied over relatively short periods of time, and not considering the multi-faceted context of childhood disadvantage. Lidia Panico discusses how she used the UK Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative cohort of over 18,000 children, to consider how parental separation affects the experience of childhood poverty and multi-domain deprivation from birth to age 11.

Robert Pollak discusses the substantial effects of fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children's long-term educational outcomes. He posits that analysis suggests that the effects of fathers' MPF are primarily due to selection rather than resources. He also discusses how his results show that fathers’ MPF warrants far more attention than it has thus far received.