| Seminars
Upcoming Seminars
The PGDA Seminar Series is open to students and faculty from across Harvard University. The invited guest speaker presents his or her research on aging and will be available for questions and discussion. Speakers include Harvard faculty, as well as faculty from other institutions.
All seminars are held at the:
Center for Population and Development Studies
9 Bow Street, 1st Floor Conference Room
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-496-4060 | Fax: 617-495-5418
Email: kfabella@hsph.harvard.edu
PGDA 2008-2009 Seminar Series
Disempowered by Whom? Inlaws' Influence on Decision Making in Indian Families (PDF)
Reeve Vanneman - Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
Date: September 15, 2008
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Abstract: The now-frequent use of decision-making questions in household surveys has greatly enhanced our understanding of intra-household power relations. While much of the research interest in these questions has focused on the relative influence of the husband or the wife in household decision-making, in developing societies where extended families are common, senior men and women in the household often have important voices. Our analysis disentangles the extent to which a woman is being disempowered by her husband versus others (usually her in-laws) in her household. We use data from a new 41,554 household survey, the India Human Development Survey 2005, to examine how a woman's lack of power is a function of both gender and generation. Age, a senior position in the extended family, and landlessness are all related to more decision-making power for both the wife and her husband. So, young women in landed households are disempowered more by their inlaws than by their husbands. Labor force participation and endogamy, on the other hand, strengthen her say in decision-making relative to both her husband and her senior in-laws. By ignoring the full dynamics of power distributions within a family, we may be conflating inequalities of gender with those of generation and thereby mis-specifying our models of empowerment.
Sobering Up: The Impact of the 1985-1988 Russian Anti-Alcohol Campaign on Child Health (PDF)
Andrea Balan-Cohen - Assistant Professor of Economics, Tufts University
Date: October 27, 2008
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of parental alcohol consumption on child health by taking advantage of a unique shock to alcohol supply: the 1985 to 1988 alcohol prohibition campaign in Russia. This campaign was temporally short lived, and resulted in large amounts of exogenous geographic variation in its intensity and
effectiveness. I construct a new data set that combines the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey with regional data on alcohol consumption. Using both a differences-in-differences approach, as well as instrumental variables methods, I find significant improvements in child height, immunization rates, and chronic conditions among children born during prohibition who also lived in regions with effective
anti-alcohol campaigns. This confirms the effect of investments during a child’s fetal period and first two years of life on long-term health measures,and demonstrates a potential positive effect of suppressing parental access to alcohol. Furthermore, evidence from vaccination rates suggests that the positive effect of prohibition on child health occurred through improvements in parental time, rather than income resources.
Do Family Planning Programs Promote Development?: Evidence from a Long Term Social Experiment in Matlab, Bangladesh, 1977-1996 (PDF)
Paul Schultz - Malcolm K. Brachman Professor Emeritus of Economics, Yale University
Date: November 10, 2008
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Abstract: Survey and census data from 141 villages in Matlab district of Bangladesh from 1974 to 1996 are analyzed, during which half of the
villages received from 1977 to 1996 a social experiment centered on
home visits every other week from a family planning and
maternal-child health field worker. Lifetime fertility and surviving
children are about 16 percent lower from 1982 to 1996 in the program
villages compared with the control villages, though child-women
ratios are no different in 1974. In addition to fertility, various
family outcomes are better in program than in control villages in
1996, such as women's BMI (i.e. health), women's monthly earnings,
their household assets, and intergenerational investments in human
capital in the form of sons's and daughter's survival, daughter's
nutrition, and son's schooling. Moderating village population growth
by the program is not associated with greater wages or paid
employment of young women and men, or older men, whereas the monthly
earnings of older women who presumably avoided unwanted childbearing
are one-third larger, and household assets per adult are one fourth
larger, and the household's portfolio is systematically larger for
assets that rely least on child labor and are expected to substitute
for the life cycle contribution provided by children to parent
consumption and retirement requirements.
Demographic change, Human Capital, and the Demand for Housing. British Evidence
Thies Lindenthal - Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Economics, Maastricht University
Date: December 8, 2008
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Abstract: The paper aims to investigate how demographics determine the amount
and the quality of housing services demanded, based on a very detailed 2001 cross-section of English households. It refines the existing
methodology by distinguishing between life cycle variables that are
expected to change with age for each household, and cohort variables
that are determined by the household’s birth-cohort and not by age. The
paper’s key results are that housing demand is mainly driven by human
capital and that is does not decline with age. A scenario analysis
with different population projections shows that in case of stagnating
household numbers total demand can still increase as the population
grows older. These findings are relevant to other European countries
that already experience population shrinkage at an unprecedented magnitude.
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