Having Better-Educated Offspring May Add Years to Parents’ Lives

Harvard RWJF HSS Alum Esther Friedman, PhD, has co-authored a study that suggests that making an investment in children’s higher education may have a big payoff for parents’ lifespan. The study has received media coverage, including this article in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, and this piece in Yahoo News.

Temporary migration and epidemiology trends in rural South Africa

Harvard Pop Center affiliated faculty Kathleen Kahn and Stephen Tollman have co-authored a study that finds that in the Agincourt sub-district of northeast South Africa, temporary migration (migrants relocating mainly for work purposes and remaining linked to the rural household) is more important than age and gender in explaining variations in mortality, whatever the cause. The study suggests that public health policies should account for population mobility, and that the…

Rural South Africa seeing increase in mortality in population aged over 50 due to HIV/TB

Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman, PhD, and affiliated researchers Kathleen Kahn, PhD, and Stephen Tollman, PhD, have co-authored a study published in the International Journal of Social Epidemiology that examines the social conditions and disability related to the mortality of older people in rural South Africa.

Do differences in social policy underlie an important part of the US health disadvantage?

A paper co-authored by  Ichiro Kawachi, MD, PhD, titled “Why Do Americans Have Shorter Life Expectancy and Worse Health Than Do People in Other High-Income Countries?” published in the Annual Review of Public Health examines whether crucial differences in social policy may play an important role in why US Americans lead shorter and less healthy lives than do people in other high-income countries.

Mortality Expectation and Fertility Choice

Pop Center faculty members, David Bloom and David Canning, and PGDA fellows, Isabel Gunther and Sebastian Linnemayr, analyze the role of mortality expectations on population growth in their paper, “Fertility Choice, Mortality Expectations, and Interdependent Preferences An Empirical Analysis“.