Seminar Series

Stanford’s Jamie Jones lays out the key features of the human life cycle and their relationship with a bet-hedging reproductive strategy. He discusses demographic methods he’s developed to measure life-history trade-offs, and discusses the possibilities of extending these to understanding the selective consequences of economic decisions more generally.

Brown University's Anna Aizer discusses how the causal effect of being a child of a teen mother is much smaller than that implied by cross-sectional differences, but examines the remaining significant long-term, adverse consequences, especially for children born to the youngest teen mothers.

The World Bank's Owen Ozier discusses the negative relationship between prevalence of gender languages and women's labor force participation in India, as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa countries where indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender structure. In his talk, Ozier also looks at how educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages are gender languages

With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Sonaldi Desai discusses how the rise in hypogamous marriage by education paradoxically reflects how deep-rooted gender scripts in India--and other salient social boundaries such as caste, religion, and family socioeconomic status--are much more difficult to cross.

Syracuse's Jennifer Karas Montaz discusses how U.S. life expectancy is increasingly being shaped by where residents live and their level of education. She examines the importance of macro-level explanations, particularly U.S. state policies and decades of deregulation, and the devolution of political authority from federal to state levels—all contributing to widening inequalities in life expectancy.

Daniel Adkins examines the influence of physical illness on sexual risk-taking behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood, both directly and through moderation of the impact of social disadvantage. He looks at the positive effects for social disadvantage and physical illness on sexual risk behavior—consistent with the development of fast life history behavioral strategies—among adolescents facing greater life adversity.

The Hidden Information in Names

Christina Kamis looks at the long-term consquences of parental mental health, specifically how childhood stressors influence adult mental health and well-being. Jessie West discusses the impact of disability on quality of life, examining disability influence over different stages of the life course.

Kevin Lewis discusses how Big data is increasingly used to answer longstanding social scientific questions and how "digital footprints" of human interaction often provide unusually nuanced information on an unprecedented scale that often obscures as much as it illuminates. Lewis draws on the example of online dating to illustrate a few basic fallacies in how big data are often framed for social science research, and suggests some alternative (and potentially more constructive) paths moving forward.