Race, Culture and Health: Conceptual and Methodological Innovations

Abstract: Building a culture of health and achieving health equity requires that we engage cultural processes in a more meaningful way. Cultural processes and systems are commonly referenced in health inequity scholarship but empirical research generally lags behind this conceptual emphasis. I argue that employing a transdisciplinary approach to examining intersections of culture, structure and racism is a valuable analytical tool for understanding the production of social and racial inequities in health. In this talk, I’ll discuss conceptual work advancing the concept of “cultural racism” in relation to racial inequities in health and will also provide an overview of related empirical projects: 1) a laboratory experiment examining the effects of media-based racism on physiological, psychological and behavioral stress responses, 2) a data science project exploring ways to assess chronic exposure to media-based racism and possible links to population health and 3) the use of virtual reality to promote structural competence regarding the structural and cultural roots of racism. In lieu of a deep dive on a single project or paper, the presentation seeks to support a rich conversation about the need for conceptual and methodological innovation in service of better understanding and addressing racial inequities in health.

Machine Learning for Causal Inference

Abstract: Given advances in machine learning over the past decades, it is now possible to accurately solve difficult non-parametric prediction problems in a way that is routine and reproducible. In this talk, I'll discuss how these machine learning tools can be rigorously integrated into observational study analyses, and how they interact with classical ideas around randomization, semiparametric modeling, double robustness, etc. When deployed carefully, machine learning enables us to develop statistical estimators that reflect the study design more closely than basic linear regression based methods.

A Century of Educational Inequality in the United States

Abstract: The “income inequality hypothesis” holds that rising income inequality affects the distribution of a wide range of social and economic outcomes. Research highlighting the sharp increase in educational inequality in recent decades has fuelled concerns that rising income inequality has had damaging consequences for equality of educational opportunity, even while other researchers have provided descriptive evidence at odds with the income inequality hypothesis. In this paper we track long-term trends in family income inequalities in college enrollment ("enrollment inequality") using all available nationally representative datasets for cohorts born between 1908 and 1995. We show that the trend in enrollment inequality moved in lockstep with the trend in income inequality over the past century. There is one exception to this general finding: for cohorts at risk of serving in the Vietnam War, enrollment inequality was high while income inequality was low. During this period, enrollment inequality was significantly higher for men than for women. Aside from this singular confounding event, evidence on a century of enrollment inequality establishes a strong association between income inequality and enrollment inequality, providing support for the view that rising income inequality is fundamentally changing the distribution of life chances.
Co-sponsored with the Social Stratification, Inequality and Mobility Working Group

"Can Labor Market Discrimination Explain Racial Disparities in Schooling? Evidence from WWII"

Abstract: Can the racial gap in labor market earnings explain black-white disparities in the schooling of the next generation? To answer this, we exploit the large increase in labor demand in markets that received WWII defense industry contracts. This increase in labor demand combined with a policy that prohibited discrimination by race and ethnicity in the defense industries resulted in significant increases in African American earnings and declines in the racial gap in earnings between 1940 and 1950. This was achieved largely via occupational upgrading among African Americans into semi-skilled professions. In contrast with women, whose progress in the labor market was largely reversed in short order, this occupational upgrading persisted for African Americans. We argue that this persistence is consistent with declines in statistical discrimination. Moreover, we find that in these same labor markets, the next generation of African Americans invested relatively more in their human capital, as measured by greater years of schooling and a decline in the black-white schooling gap. We explore three reasons why reductions in the black white earnings gap might lead to reductions in the black white schooling gap of the next generation. First, this would relax the financial constraint faced by many African American families, allowing their children to remain in school longer. Second, occupational upgrading might have increased the returns to human capital among African Americans. Finally, there may be political responses that result in changes in public funding and provision of schooling and other public goods that affect the human capital accumulation of the next generation of African Americans. We find evidence consistent with the first explanation only. We conclude that efforts to further reduce the racial gap in schooling might consider labor market interventions.

"Renal Relationships: Understanding Living Kidney Donor Relationship Patterns"

Abstract: Who do we turn to in times of need? Traditionally, social support research has shown a strong preference to rely on strong ties in these scenarios - often, even when weak ties might be better positioned to help. However, this conclusion has recently been challenged by Small (2017), who argues that people often rely on weak ties for emotional support in stressful times, preferring to avoid more complicated strong ties. This suggests that the types of ties we activate in times of need varies by the situation. In this study, we apply this framework to the study of living donor kidney transplantation (LDKT), effectively asking: How does this behavior differ when the stakes are potentially life and death? Using a variety of primary and secondary datasets, we compare the distribution of LDKT ties to the distribution of ties who would be likely able to help, then seek to explain these relative utilization patterns as a function of medical fundamentals, social/spatial relationships, and qualitative reasoning invoked by survey respondents. Our preliminary findings show that LDKT patterns are primarily driven by social relationship quality, and far less by medical fundamentals such as the potential donors' health or genetic relationship to the patient.

Essays in Education and Crime in Colombia

This dissertation contains three essays in applied microeconomics. In the first chapter paper, I test whether the return to college education is the result of human capital accumulation or instead reflects the fact that attending college signals higher ability to employers. The second chapter provides evidence that parental incarceration increases children’s educational attainment. Finally, in the third chapter I derive a new expression that extends the Local Average Treatment Effect concept, to a setting with two sources of unobserved treatment heterogeneity.

The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life

The immigration patterns of the last three decades have profoundly changed nearly every aspect of life in the United States. What do those changes mean for the most established Americans—those whose families have been in the country for multiple generations? The Other Side of Assimilation shows that assimilation is not a one-way street. Jiménez explains how established Americans undergo their own assimilation in response to profound immigration-driven ethnic, racial, political, economic, and cultural shifts.

Co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration and the Race and Ethnicity Sociology Working Group

Understanding China's Low Fertility in a Gender and Development Approach

Without a surge of new born babies after the Chinese government relaxed the 40-year-long strict one-child family planning policy in 2013 and 2015, the focus of debates regarding China’s declining fertility has shifted from policy to economic and social forces. Different from the mainstream demographers in China, we propose a gender and development approach to understand low fertility in post-reform China. During China's transition from the socialist planned economy to market economy, the old danwei system collapsed and the public and private spheres are increasingly separating, resulting in women's intensified work-family conflicts. Emphasizing on women's dual roles regarding material production and social reproduction, we argue that sustainable fertility, gender equality and economic development can either create a virtuous circle or be trapped in a vicious circle.

With a certain degree of gender equality in both the labor market and the private families, adult women can fully exert their talents at work which can both contribute to economic growth, and also empower them at home. This can help them realize their fertility desires. With unsatisfying or uneven gender equality in the two spheres, either some Chinese women can be pushed out of the labor market to have a second child, or young women may choose to focus on personal development, and postpone or forgo marriage/fertility. We also propose a multi-party-participation social mechanism to address the long term low fertility in China, encouraging individual men and women, family, business and government to all share the duty of social reproduction.

Please join us to hear our residents interesting research and give feedback for their upcoming PAA presentations. Presenters: Amanda Gonzalez, "Do You Need to Pay for Quality Care? Exploring Associations Between Bribes and Out-of-Pocket Expenditures on Quality of Labor and Delivery Care in High Volume Public Health Facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India" Mary Robbins, "A […]

Live Births and Fertility amidst the Zika Virus Epidemic in Brazil

Abstract: In late 2015, the Brazilian Ministry of Health classified the increase in congenital malformations associated with the Zika Virus (ZIKV) a public health emergency. The risk of ZIKV-related congenital syndrome posed an exogenous threat to reproductive outcomes that could result in declining numbers of live births and potentially fertility. Using 2014-2016 monthly microdata on live births from the Brazilian Information System on Live Births, in this talk I examine live births and fertility trends amidst the ZIKV epidemic in Brazil. Findings suggest a decline in live births that is stratified across socioeconomic status and geographic lines, especially nine months after the call for pregnancy postponement. While declines in total fertility rates were small, fertility trends estimated by age and socioeconomic status suggest important differences in how Zika might have impacted Brazil’s fertility structure. Further findings using monthly data by municipality suggest that the epidemic resulted in a significant decline in fertility even when controlling for characteristics of the municipality. The findings highlight the importance of understanding how exposure to the risk of a health threat directed at fetuses has led to declines in fertility.

Immigrants’ Economic Assimilation: Evidence from Matched Administrative Records

Immigrants’ ability to succeed in the labor market and achieve economic parity with natives has significant long-term implications for their well-being and that of their children. In this talk I will present findings from two studies examining immigrants’ economic assimilation using a dataset that links respondents of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to their individual tax records. The first study examines the lifetime earnings trajectories of immigrants and measures the extent and speed with which they are able to reduce the earnings gap with natives. Findings from this study address key debates regarding ethnoracial and cohort differences in immigrants’ earnings trajectories. First, we find a racially differentiated pattern of earnings assimilation: black and Hispanic immigrants are less able to catch up with native whites’ earnings compared to white and Asian immigrants, but they are almost able to reach earnings parity with natives of their same race and ethnicity. Second, contrary to previous studies we find no evidence that recent immigrant cohorts are experiencing lower earnings growth. The second study examines immigrants’ job instability. We find that foreign-born men, particularly those who are undocumented, were at higher risk of losing their job and becoming involuntarily underemployed during the Great Recession even after controlling for demographic factors and job characteristics.