Carolina Population Center

The Interrelationship between the Status of Singlehood and the Long-term Implications for Racial and Economic Inequality
2015-11-06 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Dr. Kris Marsh
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
CPC Training Program Postdoctoral Scholar Alumna
Professor Kris Marsh’s general areas of expertise are the black middle class, demography, racial residential segregation, and education. She has combined these interests to develop a research agenda divided into three broad areas: the black middle class, the intersection of educational attainment and racial identification, and intra-racial health disparities. The common theme in her work is decomposing what it means to be black in America by focusing on intra-group variability in regards to class, space, identity, educational achievement, and mental health. Professor Marsh teaches undergraduate courses in Research Methods and Race Relations. In addition, she is interested in constructing specialized graduate and undergraduate seminars on Racial Residential Segregation, Black Middle Class, and Sociology of Education.

CPC Research Methods Series: Stories and Themes: A Framework for Qualitative Analysis
2015-10-30 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Clare Barrington
Assistant Professor of Health behavior; and CPC Faculty Fellow
Barrington’s research examines social and structural influences on health and health behaviors, with a focus on HIV prevention and health care among female sex workers, men who have sex with men (MSM), and transgender women in Latin America and Latino migrants in the United States. She has been conducting community-based research in the Dominican Republic for over 15 years. In collaboration with the Centro de Orientacion e Investigacion Integral (COIN), she studied the social networks of male clients of female sex workers. Results from this study contributed to the growing literature on normative influences on sexual behavior within social networks and were also used in developing a pilot HIV prevention intervention aimed at male clients in the Dominican Republic (funded by the USAID/Academy for Educational Development). Most recently, with support from USAID, Barrington has been studying a cohort of 250 female sex workers living with HIV in Santo Domingo and their male partners. The aim is to improve understanding of the factors influencing their achievement of optimal HIV outcomes and to assess feasibility and initial effects of a multi-level intervention called Abriendo Puertas (Opening Doors). In Guatemala, she has collaborated with researchers from the Universidad del Valle (UVG) and the Centers for Disease control to examine and compare social networks among gay identifying and non-gay identifying MSM and transgender women. She is currently working with UVG to implement two PEPFAR-funded implementation science projects to pilot the use of social networks to promote HIV testing among MSM in Guatemala City and to evaluate a multi-level intervention for MSM living with HIV. In North Carolina, Barrington has been studying the intersection between social networks, migration and HIV among Mexican migrants. She currently leads the qualitative formative research and evaluation of a HRSA project to promote early detection and linkage to care for HIV among Mexican MSM and transgender women in North Carolina. Finally, Barrington is the qualitative researcher on several mixed-methods projects including a NIDA-funded longitudinal study of relationship disruption during incarceration and HIV risk among African American men in North Carolina, a quality improvement strategy to improve maternal and child health in Ghana, and an impact evaluation of cash transfer program in Malawi.
Barrington will continue to conduct mixed-methods research to improve understanding of the long-term experiences of people living with HIV in Latin America and Latinos in North Carolina. In the Dominican Republic her goal is to continue research with the Abriendo Puertas cohort to examine the role of substance use in HIV care and treatment among female sex workers living with HIV. She also has a grant pending to the adapt Abriendo Puertas for MSM. She is also interested in exploring how to improve employment opportunities for FSW, MSM and transgender women who are living with HIV in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and North Carolina as this has emerged as key structural determinant to positive HIV outcomes across settings. With her work with Latinos in North Carolina she aims to identify strategies to overcome the challenges of geographic dispersion and social isolation for engaging with Latinos living with HIV. She is also developing a new line of research focused on chronic disease in Latin America. She will conduct formative research in collaboration with two rural diabetes clinics to examine the epidemiological transition from the perspective of community health workers and explore social determinants of diabetes in these communities.

Do Female Executives Make a Difference? The Impact of Female Leadership on Gender Gaps and Firm Performance
2015-10-23 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Luca Flabbi
Associate Professor of Economics and CPC Faculty Fellow
Professor Flabbi is a labor economist focusing on gender discrimination in labor markets, labor market search and frictions, earnings inequality across skill groups, the role of flexibility on wages, simultaneous marriage and labor market searches, intergenerational mobility, and schooling decisions. After obtaining a Ph.D. in economics at NYU, he worked both in academia, in the Economics Department at Georgetown University, and in public policy in the Research Department at the Inter-American Development Bank. Professor Flabbi joined the Department of Economics and the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during summer 2015.

Child Marriage Prevention in Amhara Region, Ethiopia: Association of Communication Exposure and Social Influence with Parents/Guardians’ Knowledge and Attitudes
2015-10-09 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Anastasia (Stacey) Gage
Professor of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, Tulane University
Dr. Anastasia Gage is a Professor in the Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, Tulane University and holds a Ph.D. in demography. She has 25 years of experience in conducting research on gender and coming-of-age issues among adolescents and young women, consequences for later life, and demographic implications, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. Her research on young people has addressed transitions to adulthood, child marriage and its health consequences, female genital cutting, health risk behaviors, and the interrelationship between schooling, fosterage, and child labor. She has published on child marriage, female empowerment and adolescent demographic behavior; intimate partner violence; dating violence attitudes and perpetration among high school students; power, control and sexual violence; and the association of maternal violence victimization with child physical punishment. Her research activities include quantitative and/or qualitative studies in a number of countries, including Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Jamaica, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia. Dr. Gage is currently President of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Member of the INDEPTH Network Scientific Advisory Committee, Member of the International Outreach Committee of the Population Association of America, and Member of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series -International Advisory Board for the National Science Foundation. She is Principal Investigator of Tulane University’s sub-agreement with the University of North Carolina on the USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation Project.

Panel Discussion, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion
2015-10-02 12:00 - 13:00
Moderator: Dr. S. Philip Morgan
Panelists
Dr. Yong Cai: CPC Faculty Fellow (Sociology)
Dr. Peter Coclanis: CPC Faculty Fellow (History)
Dr. Sian Curtis: CPC Faculty Fellow (Maternal & Child Health)
Dr. Paul Leslie: CPC Faculty Fellow (Anthropology)
Rapid population growth in the 1950s, 60s and 70s raised concern about a population explosion with repercussions for the environment, resource depletion and political stability. One could argue that the “population bomb” (Ehrlich, 1968) has been diffused – global population growth has slowed and many predict its end in the next half-century. Concern about population growth spawned a “social movement” to curb fertility; a few at the time called this hysteria and an overreaction. In retrospect more are asking this question, as the New York Times (http://tiny.cc/zlb62x) did this summer. In his 2011 PAA Presidential address, David Lam raised similar questions, as did a cover story in The Economist (October, 2009). What do we think?
Lam, D. (2011). How the world survived the population bomb: Lessons from 50 years of extraordinary demographic history. Demography, 48(4), 1231-1262.

The Migration Climate-Nexus in Central America
2015-09-25 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Valerie Mueller
Senior Research Fellow, Development Strategy and Governance Division, International Food Policy Research Institute
Prior to joining IFPRI, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. She earned her B.S. in Environmental Economics and Policy from the University of California, Berkeley (1998), and both her M.S. and Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park (2001 and 2005, respectively).
Valerie has ten years of experience working on topics related to migration and poverty dynamics and the consequences of climate variability on household welfare in developing countries. She has extensive survey experience, particularly in the area of tracking migrants from longstanding panel surveys (e.g., in Ethiopia and Pakistan). Her research has culminated into several peer-reviewed publications, notably in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Climate Change, and World Development. She also serves on the Environmental Change and Migration Thematic Working Group for the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) hosted by the World Bank.

The German Occupation of the Soviet Union in WWII: The Long-Term Effects on Health Outcomes
2015-09-18 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Klara Peter
Associate Professor of Economics and CPC Faculty Fellow
Peter serves as a principal investigator for the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), the household panel survey that CPC has been conducting since 1992. Peter first worked with the RLMS in 1997 when she received a funded scholarship as part of an RLMS training program to introduce Russian economists and sociologists from outside Moscow RLMS and to longitudinal research methods. She has been working with the RLMS ever since that date and uses these longitudinal data in much of her work. She has collaborated with Barry Popkin in fielding the RLMS since the mid2000s. She was actively involved in the design and implementation of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, the Survey of RLMS Local Administrations, and the survey of all employers of RLMS wage workers. Currently she is editing the symposium of cross-disciplinary research articles based on RLMS (forthcoming in Economics of Transition).
Peter’s advisees work on the spatial discontinuity in demographic outcomes, the factors of migration assimilation, the reversal of the gender gap in educational attainment, and intergenerational economic mobility. She teaches a PhD-level class, Labor Economics, which is a population course approved by CPC. The course attracts students from various disciplines, including economics, public policy, health policy and management, sociology, and city and regional planning.
Klara Peter’s research will take advantage of dynamic, multi-level, cross-spatial, inter-generational longitudinal analysis in understanding population-related outcomes. In particular, her research will focus on some of the methodological issues in causal inference, including the marginal treatment effect method and the spatial discontinuity design as applied to the distributional returns to human capital and other social outcomes.

Mexicans in America
2015-09-11 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Duncan Thomas
Norb F. Schaefer Professor of International Studies
Professor of Economics, Global Health and Public Policy
Department of Economics, Duke University
Duncan Thomas investigates the inter-relationships between health, human capital and socio-economic status with a focus on the roles that individual, family and community factors play in improving levels of health and well-being across the globe. Much of this work highlights resource allocation and decision-making within households and families. His research uses data from large-scale population based longitudinal surveys that he has designed and fielded in collaboration with Elizabeth Frankenberg and other colleagues in the U.S., Indonesia and Mexico. These include the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), the Work and Iron Status Evaluation (WISE), the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR) and the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS). He was elected vice president of the Population Association of America (PAA) and, prior to that, was elected to the PAA Board of Directors. He is a fellow, past president and board member of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and he currently directs the NBER Development Economics program.

The Theory of Change and Response: A New Agenda for Research on Population and Development in Africa
2015-04-24 12:00 - 13:00
The Theory of Change and Response: A New Agenda for Research on Population and Development in Africa
Dr. Yves Charbit, Professor Emeritus of Demography, University of Paris, Descartes

Selection In Utero and Quality of Surviving Males in Historical and Modern Societies
2015-04-17 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Tim-Allen Bruckner, Assistant Professor of Public Health & Planning, Policy and Design, University of California, Irvine

Competing Risk Data Analysis
2015-04-10 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. C. Suchindran, Professor of Biostatistics, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment
2015-03-27 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Jennie Brand, Associate Professor of Sociology, UCLA; CPC Training Program Alumna

Early Environments, Inflammation, and the Perpetuation of Health Disparities within and Across Generations
2015-03-20 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Thomas McDade, Professor of Anthropology & Director, Laboratory for Human Biology Research, Northwestern University; CPC Training Program Alumnus

Longitudinal and Multilevel Methods for the Multinomial Logit Model
2015-02-20 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. David Guilkey, Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

No Control Group, No Problem? Using Natural Experiments to Evaluate National-Level Nutrition Initiatives in the U.S. and Mexico
2015-02-13 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Lindsey Smith, Research Assistant Professor of Nutrition, UNC-CH; CPC Training Program Alumna

The Perils of Precarity: The Impacts of Insecure Work on Individuals and Families in Industrial Societies
2015-02-06 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Arne Kalleberg, Professor of Sociology, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

An Overview of Instrumental Variables (IVs) in the Social Sciences
2015-01-30 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Kenneth Bollen, Henry Rudolph Immerwahr Professor of Psychology & Sociology, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

Linking Microfinance and Cell Phone Technology to Promote Optimal Breastfeeding Practices in Nigeria
2015-01-23 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Valerie Flax, Research Assistant Professor of Nutrition, UNC-CH

Identity Categories and Identity Construction in Demographic Research
2015-01-15 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. David Kertzer, Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science & Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies, Brown University

Intergenerational Socioeconomic and Cultural Determinants of Latino Health: The NINOS Study
2014-11-14 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Allison Aiello, Professor of Epidemiology, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

Social, Biological, and Environmental Linkages
2014-11-07 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Linda Adair, Professor of Nutrition, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

Environmental Contaminants and Inequality in Chronic Disease Morbidity: Arsenic and Cardiometabolic Risk
2014-10-31 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Michelle Mendez, Assistant Professor of Nutrition, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

Incorporating Geographic Context into Randomized Controlled Trials: The Case of the Oral Cholera Vaccine
2014-10-24 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Michael Emch, Professor and Chair of Geography, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

Compression of Morbidity: Change over Time in the Morbidity Process
2014-10-10 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Eileen Crimmins, AARP Professor of Gerontology, University of Southern California

The Demography of Natural Disasters: What Can We Learn from DesInventar?
2014-10-03 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Mark Montgomery, Professor of Economics, Stony Brook University; Senior Associate, Population Council

Economic Boom, Population Aging, and Policy Shift: What’s Ahead for China?
2014-09-26 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Yong Cai, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center

MEASURE Evaluation: The Next Five Years
2014-09-19 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Jim Thomas, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, UNC-CH; Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center; Director, MEASURE Evaluation

Psychosocial Influences on Clinical Outcomes Among Adults Living with HIV
2014-09-12 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Brian Pence, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, UNC-CH

New Methods for Soliciting Responses to Sensitive Questions: Evidence from Adolescent Surveys in Ethiopia
2014-09-05 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. David Lindstrom, Professor of Sociology, Brown University
