Seminar Series

The United States is undergoing major demographic changes including an increase in life expectancy and a rapidly growing aging population. These demographic shifts are expected to strain social assistance programs and families. While the extended family plays a significant role as a source of caregiving and financial support to its members, decision-making within the extended family is relatively understudied due to lack of adequate data. In this project, I employ rich data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and extend economic household decision-making models to examine how extended families allocate resources. I find that families do not pool their resources or allocate them in an efficient manner, leaving welfare gains on the table. I then explore why efficiency may not prevail in extended families by examining information asymmetry. I present descriptive evidence for the existence and extent of information asymmetry in the family, and I find that families with better information allocate their resources more efficiently. These findings provide suggestive evidence that information asymmetry may hinder efficient resource allocations in the family.

Studies on unemployment typically assess its costs on the individual level. However, when unemployment occurs, individuals, their families, and their kin all lose. Close kin provide the majority of social support for unemployed adults. Applying demographic and statistical techniques to official statistics and multiple survey datasets, we assess the prevalence of and exposure to unemployment in the United States from a kinship perspective. The results indicate dramatic racial disparities in the number of unemployed kin and the number of kin who would be affected by an unemployed person. Specifically, during the pandemic-induced recession, black Americans have 1.7unemployed people in their extended family compared to 1.2 among whites. Further, every job loss in a black extended family affects approximately 23 related members of the family through kinship ties, but this number among whites is only about 20. The findings of this study draw attention to the need for an understanding of unemployment and its demographic implications, which are stratified by race.

In the U.S., early childhood investments such as breastfeeding and daily reading are strongly promoted by pediatricians and public health campaigns as critical investments in children’s health and cognitive development. Qualitative research on gender, work, and family shows that women unambiguously find these investments difficult to combine with paid work. This study uses a nationally representative sample and an event study design to examine how breastfeeding intensity and reading daily to young children shape mothers’ labor supply, wages, and job characteristics over the short and long term in the U.S.

Short birth spacing, a birth-to-conception interval of under 18 months, is common in the United States, with over one third of all second or higher order children conceived under 18 months after the birth of their older sibling. While associations between short birth spacing and adverse health outcomes immediately post-birth are well-documented, the linkages between short birth intervals and long-term child well-being remain understudied. In addition, studies linking birth spacing to long-term child health rarely account for birth order. In this talk, I outline a program of research to fill this research gap and examine connections between birth spacing and order and child health, focusing on the risk of abuse and neglect in early childhood. Using birth records data in North Carolina for the past 25 years linked to multiple administrative data sources, I estimate the probability of child maltreatment investigations within the first five years of life by family size and birth-to-conception interval. I also evaluate whether current recommendations for birth spacing are relevant for child maltreatment prevention and identify sub-populations at the highest risk of child maltreatment following short birth spacing. My findings offer a nuanced view of how family size and birth intervals can affect child well-being as well as a critical consideration of the role that poverty plays in driving such associations.

Despite the centrality of structural explanations for understanding racialized inequality, less than one percent of studies on the link between race and health have focused on structural racism. Moreover, the conceptualization of structural racism in the race theory literature has often differed from the measurement strategies used in population health research.  This study advances the field by 1) distilling central tenets of theories of structural racism into concrete measures of structural racism, 2) conceptualizing U.S. states as racialized institutional actors shaping health,  3) developing a novel latent measure of structural racism in states across multiple domains, including political participation, education, economics, housing, and the judicial system, 4) mapping structural racism across states, and 5) quantifying the effects of structural racism on six individual-level health outcomes and state-level COVID-19 mortality among Black and white adults

We use an innovative strategy for linking parents to their adult children in the United States census to produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status from 1850 to 1940. We begin with data from a large, online, crowd- sourced genealogy platform (familysearch.org), which includes millions of users who personally link records to the profiles of their family members. We include the links created by these users in our data set, but also use information from the links they create to inform other supervised and unsupervised matching methods. Our completed data set, which we call the Census Tree, contains hundreds of millions of links among the 1850-1940 censuses. This data set is beyond the current frontier in terms of the precision, recall, and representativeness of the included links. We use these data to produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of characteristics including occupation score, literacy, and fertility. Because family members do the linking and often know the maiden names of women in their family, we are able to include women in our analysis where previous research has omitted them.

Recent breakthrough discoveries in the science of aging are transforming the way we think about growing older and stimulating cross-disciplinary research to optimize the aging process. In this lecture, Professor Ferraro reviews recent discoveries regarding the early origins of adult health and his research to identify resources that mitigate the influence of early misfortune on later life health, especially among Black and Hispanic populations.

Research has made clear that racial inequality is affected by neighborhood conditions. One important condition is the accessibility of financial establishments. We examine how living in minority neighborhoods affects ease of access to conventional banks vs. to alternative financial institutions (AFIs) such as check cashers and payday lenders. Based on more than 6 million queries, we compute the difference in the time required to walk, drive, or take public transit to the nearest bank vs. the nearest AFI from the middle of every block in each of 19 of the nation’s largest cities. Results suggest that race is strikingly more important than class: even after numerous economic, demographic, and structural conditions are accounted for, the AFI is more often closer than the bank in well-off minority neighborhoods than in poor white ones. I discuss implications.

Online dating sites have become a prominent method for Chinese young people to find romantic partners, edging out traditional means for pursuing marriage. Using data from the popular online dating site Huatian, which targets highly educated white-collar workers in urban China, I investigate whether online dating preferences still draw on traditional Chinese dating values such as homogamy and hypergamy; I also investigate gender differences in assortative mate preferences by educational attainment and income. The findings suggest that the marriage tradition of homogamy is still salient in the educational and income assortative mating of the young generation. However, educational hypergamy and hypogamy are also prevalent among people holding bachelor or higher education degrees regardless of gender. In fact, when it comes to income, people, especially male love-seekers, are more likely to be hypergamous rather than resemble one another. In addition, I find little evidence of diminishing status hypergamy in age and height.

Demography has a lot of great tools for peering into the future.  We knew that declining fertility was going to make societies older.  Throw in declines in mortality, especially at older ages, and the aging and aged societies that so many of us live in were always in the cards.  But does the fact that aged societies are not unexpected make them any less revolutionary?  I have wondered for some time whether the gradualism and continuity in the demographic process that has gotten us to this point has blinded us to the oddity of where we are.  Whereas most talks feature a speaker trying to convince an audience that he or she knows something that they do not, here the speaker would like to know what everyone else knows about the future of aging and aged societies that he does not.  This being 2021, Covid-19 will be mentioned.