The Incidence of Public Subsidies to Private Hospitals under Weak Governance: Evidence from India (joint with Radhika Jain)

Expanding public health insurance and enlisting private agents for service delivery are common policy strategies to meet the goals of universal health coverage, but there is limited evidence from developing countries to inform their design. This paper, joint with Radhika Jain from Harvard School of Public Health, provides quantitative evidence on how insurance design affects program performance and incidence in the context of a government-funded health insurance program that aims to provide free care to 46 million people in Rajasthan, India. We exploit a policy-induced natural experiment, and use administrative claims linked to patient surveys, to provide the first large-scale evidence of private hospital behavior under public health insurance.

Leveraging big data to assess health effects of changes in physical and social environments, and policy and program implementation

In the era of big data there are opportunities to answer policy-relevant health questions in ways that are timely and cost-efficient. This talk will describe coordination of health data resources for health monitoring and to address questions about the health effects of policies in California. Examples of health effect assessments, including those related to gun shows and the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA), will be presented.

Prep School for Poor Kids: The Long-Run Impacts of Head Start on Human Capital and Economic Self-Sufficiency 

This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted 2000-2013 Census-ACS data linked to date and place of birth in the SSA’s Numident file. Using the county-level rollout of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and state age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, we find that participation in Head Start is associated with increases in adult human capital and economic self-sufficiency, including a 0.29-year increase in schooling, a 2.1-percent increase in high-school completion, an 8.7-percent increase in college enrollment, and a 19-percent increase in college completion. These estimates imply sizable, longterm returns to investing in large-scale preschool programs.

Individual and Neighborhood Vulnerability over the Latin American Immigrant Health Experience

The state of Latino health seemingly defies the way in which the historical disadvantages faced by people of color in the United States get under the skin, and how place matters in reflecting or further reproducing these disparities. Hispanics –especially foreign-born individuals with lower socioeconomic statuses– have more favorable health than other race/ethnic groups –notably, U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites– in a limited but very important set of health outcomes such as cardiovascular function, some cancers and mortality across much of the life course.

In this talk, I discuss the mechanisms/phenomena driving the Hispanic immigrant health advantage, which is likely tied to processes of self-selection as well as to protection and resilience likely operating particularly well in heavily-concentrated Latino neighborhoods and enclaves. Throughout, I present my empirical research aimed at disentangling self-selection processes from the protection that immigrants might draw from fellow neighborhood and/or community members. I further discuss these findings in the context of how immigrants adapt in the longer term: these advantages and resilience eventually erode as immigrants spend more time in the United States –as well as across immigrant generations– through a series of processes by which immigrant and Latino vulnerability become somatized.

I conclude by speculating on the likely future of Latino and immigrant health, discussing how the resilience and vulnerability of Latino immigrants might evolve given recent major shifts U.S. immigration and social policies and practices, and due to important changes in the dynamics of migration between Mesoamerica and the United States.

The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Family Dynamics in Europe

Although men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. In this talk, I will discuss the main results of a major research project that aimed to investigate the implications of the reversal of the gender gap in advanced education for family life across European countries. I highlight the results about union formation and assortative mating, discuss our findings about union stability as well as about husbands’ and wives’ relative earnings. Finally, I present some first results from research about implications for fertility behavior. To conclude, I will reflect on implications for conventional theories used in family sociology and demography.

Neural mechanisms lie behind the emergence of dyadic affective reciprocity and transitive closure in human groups

This talk considers a set of findings from socializing cognitive social neuroscience that captures neural and social network data at multiple time points for a group of students who volunteered to organize workers in very difficult social situations on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, in the Summer of Respect project. We identify a neural mechanism for the emergence of affective reciprocity, the building block of social solidarity. We show that we can predict from neural signatures who group members will like five months in the future. We extend this work to a discussion of transitivity, or balance. Time permitting, we discuss how a neural signature of self-enhancement (narcissism) predicts becoming peripheral in small groups, supporting the idea that there is "no I in team".

Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department

Measuring Reproductive Autonomy: Are the questions different for Adolescents and Young Adults?

Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH will discuss her previous work developing the Reproductive Autonomy Scale, which has been mainly used among adults. Her current work focuses on understanding reproductive empowerment among young people, and the development of a new psychometric measure of Sexual Health and Reproductive Empowerment for Young Adults (The SHREYA Scale).

Co-sponsored with The Bixby Center