Seminar Series

Syracuse's Jennifer Karas Montaz discusses how U.S. life expectancy is increasingly being shaped by where residents live and their level of education. She examines the importance of macro-level explanations, particularly U.S. state policies and decades of deregulation, and the devolution of political authority from federal to state levels—all contributing to widening inequalities in life expectancy.

With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Sonaldi Desai discusses how the rise in hypogamous marriage by education paradoxically reflects how deep-rooted gender scripts in India--and other salient social boundaries such as caste, religion, and family socioeconomic status--are much more difficult to cross.

The World Bank's Owen Ozier discusses the negative relationship between prevalence of gender languages and women's labor force participation in India, as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa countries where indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender structure. In his talk, Ozier also looks at how educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages are gender languages

Brown University's Anna Aizer discusses how the causal effect of being a child of a teen mother is much smaller than that implied by cross-sectional differences, but examines the remaining significant long-term, adverse consequences, especially for children born to the youngest teen mothers.

Stanford’s Jamie Jones lays out the key features of the human life cycle and their relationship with a bet-hedging reproductive strategy. He discusses demographic methods he’s developed to measure life-history trade-offs, and discusses the possibilities of extending these to understanding the selective consequences of economic decisions more generally.

Paul Hooper discusses how his own unique model of evolutionary intergenerational transfers is also broadly relevant for understanding the evolution of human life histories, including longevity, length of dependence, age-schedule of fertility and demographic transitions.

Duke University’s Scott Lynch discusses "progressive mediation,” a theory that suggests the extent to which childhood SES exerts an independent influence on adult health depends on the seriousness of the health outcome being considered. Lynch posits that childhood status can have strong residual influences on lesser health conditions and precursors to more serious conditions, while having weak, or no, residual influences on more serious health conditions.

Elizabeth Bruch discusses how she applied rich activity data from a large, U.S. online dating site to examine how population composition interacts with mate-seeking behavior to shape men and women's romantic outcomes. She also reviews how local markets shape dating experiences both directly, by constraining the type and number of people one is exposed to, and indirectly, through the dynamic interplay between human behavior and experience.

Combining a natural experiment and a panel survey, we examine the effect of prenatal exposure to stress on children's outcomes. We find persistent negative effects on cognition, executive function, and educational achievement. The negative effect is strong among children in poor families but non-existent among middle-class children. Stanford University's Florencia Torche discusses possible mechanisms for these negative effects.