“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.

Website

"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.

"Utilizing Smartphones to Study Disadvantaged and Hard-to-Reach Groups: The Newark Smartphone Reentry Project"

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I discuss the use of smartphones to collect real-time information on the experiences of men recently released from prison and on parole in Newark, New Jersey. Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, offer social scientists a potentially powerful approach to examine the social world. They enable researchers to collect information that was previously unobservable or difficult to measure, expanding the realm of empirical investigation. For research that concerns resource-poor and hard-to-reach groups, such as men recently released from prison, smartphones may be particularly advantageous by lessening sample selection and attrition and by improving measurement quality of irregular and unstable experiences. The first part of this talk describes the project and the smartphone application. I then present findings from one working paper, which uses GPS estimates to assess neighborhood-level daytime exposure by men on parole and the association between exposure and crime rates.

"The Other One Percent: Indians in America "

ABSTRACT

People of Indian origin—whether they are Indian-born or American-born—make up about 1% of the U.S. population. While there are several anecdotal accounts of Indians in America as well as scholarly studies on specific sub-groups, The Other One Percent is the first data-driven comprehensive account of the community. The book focuses on three major issues: Selection—the processes by which people from a low-income country have become the highest-income and most-educated group in the U.S; Assimilation—the multiple pathways and challenges of integration while maintaining some aspects of their distinctive identities; and Entrepreneurship—from motels to medicine and finance to technology. Drawing from different academic disciplines, the book examines the entire community, from its successful to its marginal members. The Other One Percent is a follow-up to Kapur’s prior book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration From India on India, for which he earned a 2012 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association.