Seminar Series

Combining a natural experiment and a panel survey, we examine the effect of prenatal exposure to stress on children's outcomes. We find persistent negative effects on cognition, executive function, and educational achievement. The negative effect is strong among children in poor families but non-existent among middle-class children. Stanford University's Florencia Torche discusses possible mechanisms for these negative effects.

Today's college students are in an increasingly diverse society, yet the majority of students still live in segregated communities across the United States before moving to college. The incoming student’s college dormitory experience marks a potentially meaningful and naturally existing cross-group event. Gaither reviews her past work on cross-race roommates and the resulting positive outcomes of improved interracial behavior. She also discusses current work on whether having a randomly-assigned versus a self-selected roommate influences student diversity outcomes.

Martin Ruef examines how slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period, both at the macro-level - through the uneven distribution of the nonwhite population across regions, states, and counties - and at the micro-level - through the isolation of slaves and free people of color away from the residences of whites. Ruef draws the conclusion that institutional slavery played a critical part in concentrating African Americans within a subset of counties in the U.S. South while rendering them invisible to broad segments of the white populace.

A wide variety of models are applied to analyze longitudinal data. This seminar provides an overview of three popular ones: the latent growth curve (LGC), the autoregressive (AR), and the autoregressive latent trajectory (ALT) longitudinal models. The seminar presents each model and discusses their parameters and interpretation.

In this seminar, Filiz Garip discusses how homophily and consolidation allow researchers to capture the structural constraints to diffusion, and explains why some newly-emerging migrant communities eventually come to surpass historic migrant regions in levels of migration.

Duke University's Cheryl Elman discusses the relationship between development and disease in the twentieth century American south. Plantation croppers, disproportionately African American, were generally malnourished, poorly housed, and legally tied to farms through debt to plantation owners and local merchants. The southern population through the 1940s was also exposed to poor sanitation and parasitic diseases of malaria and hookworm.

More than 600,000 prisoners are released from U.S. prisons each year, and roughly one-half of these individuals are back in prison within just three year, creating a vicious cycle of recidivism. In this seminar, Kirk discusses the experimental housing mobility program for recently released prisoners, The Maryland Opportunities through Vouchers Experiment (MOVE). Kirk designed MOVE to test whether residential relocation far away from former neighborhoods can yield reductions in recidivism.

The U.S. is the only advanced industrialized country without a national policy providing paid family and medical leave. In recent years, a handful of states and localities have begun to enact state or local legislation in this area. The effects of such laws on outcomes for employees have been studied, but we know relatively little about impacts on employers. In this talk, Jane Waldfogel will present findings from a program of research to address this gap that she has undertaken with colleagues Ann Bartel, Christopher Ruhm, and Maya Rossin-Slater.

In the psychology literature it’s not uncommon to read speculation about whether adult age differences in behavior are due to “biological declines” OR “motivational changes”. The implication of these alternatives is that motivational change or preservation is not biological. The authors speculating are not necessarily dualists, but rather these questions have emerged as an artifact of the tools being used to study adult age effects on cognition and motivation. There has been a historical incompatibility in the field between motivational theories that are largely verbal and based on behavioral evidence and cognitive theories which are often more computational and based on a combination of behavioral and neurobiological evidence. In this more theoretically leaning talk, I will briefly present a series of findings from studies using fMRI and PET imaging of the dopamine system that are beginning to provide a neurobiological account of motivation and aging. In addition to resolving dualistic accounts of aging, the studies have identified preservation of motivational systems that may be used to further enhance function in older age. These discoveries have led to a shift in our lab research from primarily studying financial health to also studying physical health behavior change.

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. Maya Rossin-Slater examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family life---the months immediately following childbirth---and identifies the impacts of paternal access to workplace flexibility on maternal postpartum health.