"New Thoughts on Old Age "
ABSTRACT
I will discuss late-age career transitions and retirement incentive plans, the annuity puzzle, and financial issues that are faced by the aging population. My discussion aims to stimulate new thoughts and argument about aging and retirement.
"Research Funding and the Foreign Born "
ABSTRACT
There has been a resurgence of interest in the link between immigration and economic activity. The evidence suggests that US education plays an important role in both attracting and retaining high-quality foreign-born students. This is particularly true in the case of doctorates trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), a workforce that is disproportionately foreign born and likely to contribute to long-term economic growth. Because of this, much effort is given toward attracting talented students and retaining them in the US workforce after they complete their studies. However, little is known about how that attraction and retention works. In this paper we use new data to examine the role of an important policy lever-research funding—in keeping both domestic and foreign-born workers in the US labor market.
"The Problem of Causal Mutualisms, The Promise of Polygenic Scores, and The Pervasive Divergence of Life Outcomes"
ABSTRACT
Casual mutualisms are sets of properties that have substantial reciprocal influence on one another. This may sound abstruse, but various big constructs in behavioral science, including "heritability," "SES", "health", and "achievement," exhibit clear signs of instantiating massive mutualisms and yet many implications of their doing so remain largely unpursued. The talk will describe the problem and several routes into it by reference to a series of phenomena that might otherwise appear unrelated, on intellectual achievement, educational attainment, and health disparities. Together these examples are used to argue for a more strongly integrative and developmental social science, as well as the potential value of predictive scores based on genomic information for helping reckon with mutualisms.
"Harnessing Social Networks and Social Systems for Obesity Prevention"
ABSTRACT
Our health and social networks are closely intertwined. In this talk, I describe how the complex web of family, friend, and peer relationships in which we are embedded—i.e., our social networks– influence eating, physical activity, and obesity, and how the dynamics of our evolving behaviors and social networks shape population obesity rates. I will outline intervention and policy strategies that have the potential to activate, harness, or alter social networks and broader social-ecological systems, so that these social contexts play a more supportive role in the prevention and treatment of obesity.
"Legal Origins and Female HIV "
ABSTRACT
More than half of all people living with HIV are women and 80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formally colonized countries significantly determines current day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law Sub-Saharan African countries compared to Civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In Sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safer sex and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the ‘feminization of AIDS’) explaining much of its prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
"To Work for Yourself, for Others, or Not at All? How Disability Benefits Affect The Employment Decisions of Older Veterans "
ABSTRACT
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program provides disability benefits to nearly one in five military veterans in the US and its annual expenditures exceed $60 billion. We examine how the receipt of DC benefits affects the employment decisions of older veterans. We make use of variation in program eligibility resulting from a 2001 policy change that increased access to the program for Vietnam veterans who served with “boots on the ground” in the Vietnam theater but not for other veterans of that same era. We find that the policy-induced increase in program enrollment decreased labor force participation and induced a substantially larger switch from wage employment to self-employment. This latter finding suggests that an exogenous increase in income spurred many older veterans to start their own businesses. Additionally, we estimate that one in four veterans who entered the DC program due to this policy change left the labor force, estimates in the same range as those from recent studies of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program.
"Early-Life Undernourishment in Developing Countries: Prevalence, Impacts over the Life Cycle and Determinants"
ABSTRACT
Early-life undernourishment is a widespread phenomenon in many developing countries, with an estimated 170 million children under 5 years of age stunted, the standard indicator of chronic malnutrition. This presentation summarizes an ongoing work program on this topic, with reference to the prevalence, impacts and determinants of such undernutrition.
"Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men"
ABSTRACT
For forty years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black males with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study's methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical community. We find that the historical disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.4 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men.
The Center for Social Statistics Presents: Predicting the Evolution of Intrastate Conflict: Evidence from Nigeria url: http://css.stat.ucla.edu/event/shahryar-minhas/ The endogenous nature of civil conflict has limited scholars' abilities to draw clear inferences about the drivers of conflict evolution. We argue that three primary features characterize the complexity of intrastate conflict: (1) the interdependent relationships of conflict between […]
"Refund Anticipation Products and the Improper Payment of the EITC."
The use of big data has become increasingly common in social and health research, raising a series of new and difficult questions about research ethics. In this informal workshop, a panel of investigators using big data for their research will describe issues that they have faced and other potential problems. As background to this workshop, […]
"Reservation Employer Establishments: Data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Data Set"
Abstract: The presence of employers and jobs on American Indian reservations has been difficult to analyze due to limited data. We are the first to geocode confidential data on employer establishments from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) to identify location on or off American Indian reservations. We identify the per-capita establishment count and jobs in reservation-based employer establishments for most federally recognized reservations. Comparisons to nearby non-reservation areas in the lower 48 states across 18 industries, reveal that reservations have a similar sectoral distribution of employer establishments but have significantly fewer of them in nearly all sectors, especially when the area population is below 15,000 (as it is on the vast majority of reservations and for the majority of the reservation population). By contrast, total jobs provided by reservation establishments are, on average, at par with or somewhat higher than in nearby county areas but are concentrated among casino-related and government employers. An implication is that average employment per establishment are higher in these sectors on reservations, including those with populations below 15,000, while the rest of the economy is sparser in reservations (in firm count and jobs per capita) Geographic and demographic factors such as population density and per capita income statistically account for some but not all of these differences.
Please come join us to learn all about the California Center for Population Research!
"The challenges of estimating mortality in small areas -- using German counties as a case study"
Abstract: We develop and analyze Bayesian models that produce good estimates of complete mortality schedules for small areas, even when the expected number of deaths is very small. The models also provide estimates of uncertainty about local mortality schedules. The TOPALS relational model is the primary building block, used to model age-specific mortality rates within each small area. TOPALS models produce estimates for single-year ages from a small number of local parameters. We experiment with Bayesian models for smoothing and ‘borrowing’ mortality information across space, using two alternative specifications. First we test a Bayesian model with conditional autoregressive (CAR) priors for TOPALS parameters. CAR priors assign higher probability to parameters that are similar across adjacent areas, thus emphasizing spatial smoothness in estimated rates. Second, we test a hierarchical Bayesian model, which assigns higher probability to parameters that are similar for locations that are close in terms of political geography.
"Getting Under the Skin: Socio-Psychobiological Pathways and Racial Disparities in Health"
Abstract: Racism is physically embodied through social, behavioral, and psychobiological mechanisms. In this talk, David H. Chae, will discuss the utility of a social-ecological and developmental lens to examine how racism is biologically embedded. He will discuss his research on multiple levels of racism and the channels through which they compromise health throughout the lifecourse.
"The Impact of Socioenvironmental Stressors on Alcohol-Linked Suicides: A Nationwide Postmortem Study"
Abstract: Not only is suicide a major public health problem, but also, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8,179 deaths and 273,206 years of potential life lost resulted from alcohol attributable suicides in 2006-10 (the latest years available). Since 2011, Professor Kaplan and his colleagues have worked with the National Violent Death Reporting System Restricted Access Database on two projects funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, focusing on acute alcohol use immediately prior to suicide. This presentation will show that nearly a third of suicide decedents nationwide were intoxicated at the time of death. Furthermore, Prof. Kaplan will describe the effects of the 2008-09 economic contraction and other adverse socioenvironmental conditions on rates of suicide involving acute alcohol intoxication.
"Does Universalization of Health Work? Evidence from Health Systems Restructuring and Maternal and Child Health in Brazil"
Abstract: We investigate restructuring of the health system in Brazil motivated to operationalize universal health coverage. Using administrative data from multiple sources and an event study approach that exploits the staggered rollout of programmatic changes across municipalities, we find large reductions in maternal, foetal, neonatal and postneonatal mortality, and fertility. We document increased prenatal care visits, hospital births and other maternal and child hospitalization, which suggest that the survival gains were supply-driven. We find no improvement in the quality of births, which may be explained by endogenous shifts in the composition of births towards higher-risk births.
"Mental health and women's choices. Experimental evidence from a Randomized Control Trial"
Abstract: We evaluate the long-term impact of treating maternal depression on women's financial empowerment and parenting decisions by exploiting experimental variation induced by a cluster-randomized control trial which provided psychotherapy to perinatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. The trial, which is the largest psychotherapy trial in the world, was highly successful at reducing depression rates of mothers. We relocate mothers 6 years after the intervention concluded to evaluate the effects of the intervention on women's financial empowerment, parental investments, fertility, as well as children development. We find that treating maternal depression increased women's empowerment, particularly control over spending, both in the short-run and in the long-run. Consistent with the reports of increased control over spending, we find persistent effects of the intervention on both time- and monetary-intensive parental investment. We do not find any detectable effect on children development. The long-run treatment effects are concentrated among girls.
“What works” for justice-involved people with mental illness
Abstract: Each year, over 2 million people with serious mental illness are booked into U.S. jails. These people typically stay longer in jail than those without mental illness—and, upon release, are more likely to be reincarcerated. Today, over 300 counties have resolved to “step up” their efforts to reduce the number of people with mental illness in jail. In this presentation, I highlight research on “what works” to reduce re-offending among justice-involved people with mental illness. Programs must avoid the traditional assumption that mental illness is the direct cause of the problem, and linkage with psychiatric services is the solution. Evidence-based, cost-effective programs look beyond psychiatric explanations to address robust risk factors that are shared by people with- and without mental illness.
"Contemporary Trends in American Mortality: International Comparisons and Emerging Challenges"
Abstract: The decades surrounding the turn of the 21st century have been a challenging period for American mortality. The United States is currently facing a large-scale opioid epidemic, and life expectancy barely increased between 2010 and 2015. This talk will cover various dimensions of contemporary trends in American mortality including the contribution of drug overdose to educational gradients in life expectancy, an analysis of the contemporary drug overdose epidemic in international perspective, and how the U.S.’s recent life expectancy stagnation has impacted its standing in international life expectancy rankings relative to other high-income countries.
