Seminar Series

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 : Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children - how they might arise and how they might be remediated. This analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health reveals another important mechanism in the determinants of educational attainment - differential returns to skills for children in different circumstances.

ABSTRACT : Advanced parental ages are associated with a range of negative outcomes for the adult offspring, such as decreased health, cognitive ability, and life expectancy. The interpretation of these associations often relies on parental reproductive aging. We use large population-based samples from the U.S. and Sweden to analyze how alternative mechanisms - social selection, age at which the children lose their parents and improving macro conditions - influence the link between parental ages and offspring outcomes.

Abstract : Influenza is a disease that is associated with both old-age mortality and with occasional severe episodes known as pandemics. Interestingly, however, during pandemics, although mortality increases, the age-mortality pattern becomes less flu-like, shifting younger. This talk will outline the virological and demographic reasons for these mortality age shifts during influenza pandemics.

ABSTRACT : In age-structured two-sex population models, couple formation is modeled as a two-step process in which pairs first meet and then determine whether to match. The probability that a female of age i meets a male of age j depends on the relative numbers of such individuals, while the probability that this pair matches conditional on meeting -- the "force of attraction" for an ij pair -- is exogenously given and time independent. However, adopting a search-theoretic perspective, matching probabilities should also vary with marriage-market conditions.

ABSTRACT : Life expectancy at birth in the United States is currently among the lowest of all high-income countries. Previously, research and policy discussions focused largely on cross-national mortality differences at older ages (e.g., at ages 50 and above). This talk highlights several key dimensions of Americans' mortality disadvantage relative to a set of 16 high-income comparison countries, with an emphasis on estimating the contribution of mortality differences at younger ages to the U.S.

Educational gradients in smoking are one of the deadliest examples of social disparities in health. But is this association between education and smoking casual? If it is, and we understood which aspects of schooling caused individuals not to smoke, then educational policy could have massive health dividends. In contrast, if the relationship between education and smoking is non-causal, then the observed gradients are instead explained by other characteristics that predict both statuses, making the disparities more difficult to address.

ABSTRACT : Our recent work on aging and health in France has highlighted an expansion of the years lived with disability within life expectancy in mid-adulthood. This unexpected trend went along with an increase in the sex differentials in disability-free life expectancy (DFLE). The female advantage in life expectancy is usually balanced by a larger share of unhealthy years, and this pattern has become more pronounced recently in France for the 50-65 age groups. This derives from differences in the type of diseases and risk factors men and women of these ages have been exposed.

ABSTRACT : There continues to be substantial interest and debate regarding the health and mortality patterns of the Hispanic population in the United States. Such interest and debate has arisen because the health and mortality patterns of the Hispanic population appear to be quite favorable, while the socioeconomic status profile of this population is highly disadvantaged.

ABSTRACT : Studies since the late 1970s have shown how differential rates of mortality of members in a birth cohort affect the aggregate mortality rate. In short, as frailer members of a cohort are selected out, the aggregate mortality rate converges toward the rate of the more robust members remaining alive in the cohort. Thus, the aggregate mortality pattern may not look at all like the mortality pattern for any subpopulation within the larger population.