"Race, Class and Affirmative Action"

Abstract: This book-length manuscript (forthcoming by the Russell Sage Foundation in the Fall 2015) evaluates the ability of class-based affirmative action to promote the social and economic mobility of disadvantaged populations and boost diversity at selective postsecondary institutions, as compared with race-based policy. The book draws from within- and between-country comparisons of several prototypes of affirmative action policy. She uses the United States as a case study of race-based preferences, and Israel as a case study of class-based preferences. For each country she compares the model that has actually been implemented to a simulated scenario of the alternative policy type. The overarching goal of this book is to develop new, and more global insights about the potential of race-neutral public policy to promote equality in higher education.

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"Self-reported racial identity, genomic ancestry, and health disparities in Brazil: an exploratory study"

Abstract: Health disparities based on skin color/racial identification are present in many societies. In Brazil, studies have shown that people who describe their skin color as other than white (e.g. mixed, black, and/or indigenous) are more likely to report discrimination, are less likely to receive some types of health services, experience higher mortality, and have higher rates of some negative health behaviors. But how should we interpret these disparities given Brazil’s complex, fluid, and changing system of ethnoracial classification and racial identity? This study explores the congruence between genome-wide measures of ancestry and self-reported ethnoracial identify in Brazil and assesses their relationship with 4 health outcomes with distinct etiologies: self-rated health, hypertension, complications from Chagas disease, and all-cause mortality. Preliminary results are discussed in terms of implications for measuring and addressing such disparities in a dynamic multiracial society.

“Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Awareness, Attitudes and Uptake Among Young Gay, Bisexual and Other Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM) in California.”

Abstract: Young men who have sex with men (YMSM) in the United States (US) continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV with large racial/ethnic disparities among African-Americans and Latinos. The World Health Organization now recommends that all people at substantial risk of HIV should be offered pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). While PrEP awareness has generally increased, actual PrEP usage among MSM has been limited. Little is known about PrEP awareness, attitudes, and uptake among racially and ethnically diverse YMSM.

"The Death of the American Dream?"

Abstract: Whenever an election rolls around, we can count on dire warnings that the American Dream is under threat, that hard work and talent are no longer guarantees of success, and that what now matters most is winning the “birth lottery” and being raised by rich parents. But are these dire warnings true? Can a child born into a middle-class family expect to earn much more than a child born into a poor family? What about a child born into the one percent? Does that translate into a huge boon to the child’s earnings? Drawing on new tax-return data, the hard facts about social mobility in the U.S. are presented, with a special focus on differences in the mobility opportunities of boys and girls.

*Co-sponsored with the Dept. of Sociology & Inequality Working Group

"The Relationship between Income and Life Expectancy: Local Area Variation in the United States, 2001-2014"

Abstract: We examine inequality in life expectancy using 1.4 billion anonymous earnings and mortality records covering the U.S. population from 1999-2014. We present four main findings. First, higher income is associated with greater longevity throughout the income distribution. The richest 1% of American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1%, while the richest 1% of American women live 10 years longer than the poorest 1%. Second, inequality in life expectancy has increased in recent years at the national level. From 2001-2014, the richest 5% of Americans gained approximately 3 years in longevity, but the poorest 5% experienced no gains. Third, life expectancy varies substantially across areas, especially for low-income individuals. Life expectancy varies by approximately 5 years between the areas with the highest and lowest longevity. Trends in life expectancy varied substantially across areas as well, ranging from gains of more than 4 years between 2001 and 2014, to losses of more than 2 years. Fourth, differences in life expectancy across areas for low-income individuals are highly correlated with differences in health behaviors such as smoking, obesity and exercise. In contrast, life expectancy for low-income Americans is not significantly correlated with measures of the quantity and quality of medical care, local income inequality, residential segregation, and labor market conditions. Low-income individuals tend to live the longest (and have the most healthful behaviors) in affluent cities with highly educated populations and high levels of government expenditures.

"Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore"

Abstract: The street sex worker market in Geylang, Singapore is a highly competitive market in which clients can search legally at negligible cost, making it ideal for testing Diamond's hypothesis regarding search and monopoly pricing. As Diamond predicts, price discrimination survives in this market. Despite an excess supply of workers, but consistent with their self-reported attitudes and beliefs, sex workers charge Caucasians (Bangladeshis) more (less), based on perceived willingness to pay, and are more (less) likely to approach and reach an agreement with them. Consistent with taste discrimination, they avoid Indians, charge more and reach an agreement with them less frequently.

"How the Motherhood Penalty Varies by Wage, Cognitive Skill, and Race: A Reassessment"
*Co-sponsored with the Family Working Group.

Abstract: Motherhood reduces women’s wages. Is the size of this penalty largest among the most or least advantaged women? Two 2010 papers using the same panel data suggest opposite answers to this question. With and without controls for years of employment experience, Wilde et al. find higher motherhood wage penalties for those with higher cognitive skill, while Budig and Hodges find higher penalties for women at lower wage levels. Taken together, these findings are puzzling, because women with higher cognitive skills typically have higher wages. Using unconditional quantile regression, panel data, and fixed effects, we assess how penalties vary by intersections of skill, wage level, and race. We find that the most advantaged women—white women with high cognitive skills and high wages—experience the highest total proportionate penalties, estimated to include effects mediated through experience. Although this group has the most continuous experience, their high returns to experience make even the small amounts of time they typically take out of employment for child rearing costly. Penalties net of experience, which might represent employer discrimination or effects of motherhood on job performance, do not differ consistently by race, skill, or wage; they afflict advantaged and disadvantaged women approximately equally.

"Energy Efficiency Investments, Self-Selection, and Welfare"

Abstract: This paper evaluates the welfare consequences, rather than simply measuring energy savings, of a popular energy efficiency program exploiting a 100,000 household field experiment in Wisconsin. There are five main findings.  First, nudges, information, and behavioral interventions do not increase program participation but monetary incentives do. Second, the take-up of energy efficiency investments is relatively inelastic to expected returns and reveals substantial non-monetary benefits and costs. Third, individuals that select into the energy efficiency program based on financial incentives are less likely to make efficiency investments than individuals that select in on their own, suggesting that these programs' returns may decline as they expand. Fourth, we find that realized energy savings are just 64% of projected savings and the social internal rate of return on these investments is -1.8%. Fifth, the revealed preference welfare analysis suggests that the program reduced welfare, primarily because subsidies exceeded uninternalized externality damages.

“Early-Life Undernourishment in Developing Countries: Prevalence, Associations/Impacts over the Life Cycle and Determinants”

Abstract:  This presentation first summarizes the prevalence of undernutrition among children in developing countries.  It then summarizes impacts and associations over the life cycle using the Guatemalan INCAP longitudinal data (to estimate the impacts of both a protein-rich nutritional supplements allocated randomly among a small number of villages and of height-for-age z scores at 24-36 months) and the Young Lives longitudinal data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam to investigate whether the critical window for nutrition ends in infancy.   Finally it summarizes estimates using longitudinal data from Guatemala and Cebu in the Philippines of the impact of protein and non-protein energy on early childhood height and weight.

"Firming Up Inequality"

ABSTRACT

We use a massive, new, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that two thirds of the rise in the variance of earnings is associated with workers' employers, whereas one third occurs within firms. The employer-related rise in the variance can be decomposed into two roughly equally important forces - a rise in the assortative matching of high-wage workers to high-wage firms and a rise in segregation of similar workers between firms. In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for worker composition. The rise in the employer-related inequality was particularly strong in smaller and medium-sized firms (explaining 84% for firms with fewer than 10,000 employees), driven by worker sorting and segregation. In contrast, in the very largest firms with 10,000+ employees, almost half of the increase in the variance of earnings took place within firms, driven by both declines in earnings for employees below the median and a substantial rise in earnings for the 10% best-paid employees. We also find that for the very top earners, who experienced particularly large earnings gains over the last decades, a larger share of earnings growth occurred within firms. However, the contribution of these top earners to the overall increase in earnings inequality is small.

"Strategic Choices in Polygamous Households: Theory and Evidence from Senegal"

ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a strategic framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous households.  A theoretical model specifies the main drivers of fertility in the African context and describes how the fertility of one wife might impact the behavior of her co-wives. It generates predictions to test for strategic interactions. Exploiting original data from a household survey and the Demographic and Health Surveys in Senegal, empirical tests show that children are strategic complements. One wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by the other wife, because children are the best claim to resources controlled by the husband. This result is the first quantitative evidence of a reproductive rivalry between co-wives. It suggests that the sustained high level of fertility in Africa does not merely reflect women's lack of control over births, as is often argued, but also their incentives to have many children. This paper also contributes to the literature on household behavior as one of the few attempts to open the black box of non-nuclear families.

"Do Recent Declines in U.S. Life Expectancy Mean Bad News for Healthy Life Expectancy?"

ABSTRACT

Life expectancy for non-Hispanic white (henceforth white) Americans with less than high school education has fallen in recent years—particularly for women – while life expectancy has increased substantially for the college educated population.  However, the extent to which the declines/increases in life expectancy translate into healthy life expectancy remains unclear.

"The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographical Location of
Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists "

Co-sponsored with the Department of Economics

ABSTRACT

In the U.S., personal and business taxes vary enormously from state to state. While these differences have the potential to affect the geographical location of highly skilled workers and employers across the country, evidence on their effects is limited. We uncover large, stable, and precisely estimated effects of personal and corporate taxes on star scientists’ migration patterns. The long run elasticity of mobility relative to taxes is 1.8 for personal income taxes and 1.9 for state corporate income tax. While there are other factors that drive when innovative individual and innovative companies decide to locate, there are enough firms and workers on the
margin that state taxes matter.

Website

"Probabilistic Cause-of-Death Assignment using Verbal Autopsies"

ABSTRACT

In areas without complete-coverage civil registration and vital statistics systems there is uncertainty about even the most basic demographic indicators.  In such areas the majority of deaths occur outside hospitals and are not recorded.  Worldwide, fewer than one-third of deaths are assigned a cause, with the least information available from the most impoverished nations.  In populations like this, verbal autopsy (VA) is a commonly used tool to assess cause of death and estimate cause-specific mortality rates and the distribution of deaths by cause.  VA uses an interview with caregivers of the decedent to elicit data describing the signs and symptoms leading up to the death.  This talk describes a new statistical method to classify cause of death using information acquired through VA.  Unlike current approaches, our method shares uncertainty between cause of death assignments for specific individuals and the distribution of deaths by cause across the population.  We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using side-by-side comparisons with both observed and simulated data.

“Exposure to the United States and Healthy Eating Among U.S. Immigrants:
A Life Course Perspective on Immigrant Health”

ABSTRACT

The negative acculturation perspective predicts that immigrants’ health advantages erode with increasing exposure to the U.S. due to the adoption of the unhealthy default American lifestyle. Focusing on diet, we argue that this perspective underestimates immigrants’ abilities to maintain healthy eating patterns, especially among adult immigrant arrivals, and fails to account for how migration during childhood can disrupt important developmental processes. We advance an alternative “life course perspective on immigrant health” and present evidence for it by examining the associations of age at arrival and duration of residence with healthy eating among adult immigrants. Our results suggest that earlier age at arrival is negatively associated with healthy eating and that duration of residence has a weak but positive association with healthy eating, especially among those who arrived as adults. The results call into question notions that emphasize a steady erosion of healthy eating with time and acculturation. Instead, they support the life course perspective and point to the importance of early childhood exposures for understanding how living in the U.S. influences healthy eating among immigrants.

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"Characterizing Cohort Loss Before Birth"

ABSTRACT

Answers to many central questions in the social sciences depend upon the assumption that cohort loss before birth is ignorable. Evidence from inferential population studies and small-scale cohort studies increasingly suggests otherwise. Up to 70% of human pregnancies terminate before birth; these losses appear to be non-random. In this research we consider the implications of prenatal cohort loss for a few key demographic questions, including the effects of early-life exposures on later-life health and the effects of child traits on parent outcomes. In so doing, we extend a long history of demographic research on cohort selection to the prenatal period. We conclude with a discussion of new, big data approaches to learn more about how prenatal exposures shape population traits.

"Minority Stress and the Health of Sexual and Gender Minorities: Challenges and Innovations in Population Studies"

ABSTRACT

In several highly cited papers, Dr. Meyer has developed a model of minority stress that describes the role of prejudice and stigma in promoting social stressors that bring about adverse health outcomes for LGBT people. The model has guided his and other investigators’ population research on LGBT health disparities by identifying the mechanisms by which social stressors impact health and describing the harm to LGBT people from prejudice and stigma. In this talk, Dr. Meyer will describe minority stress research findings and current challenges to the study of LGBT health. He will describe two new NIH-funded research projects that take advantage of methodological innovations. In these projects, Dr. Meyer and co-investigators assess the role of historical context and the social environment in understanding how social changes impact the study of minority stress to help understand health and well-being of LGBT people.