The Effects of First Occupation on Long Term Health Status: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

In this paper, we use a longitudinal survey that has collected information for 50 years on a large cohort of Wisconsin high school graduates and their siblings to examine the long term impact of early occupational choice on health status. We find evidence that beginning a career in a blue collar occupation is correlated with several measures of poor health outcomes at ages 50–65. Since our dataset includes usually unobserved pre-labor market characteristics, including IQ and childhood health status, we can show that controlling for these variables is important for many results and suggests a high level of selection into occupation based on health and ability. We also provide evidence of gender differentials in the association between first occupation and later health. Then, we replace our basic measure of occupational categories with summary measures of job characteristics and find that employment at “bad jobs” at the beginning of an individual’s career predicts later health outcomes. Finally, we use sibling information in the dataset to show that unmeasured family background factors explain a large share of the effects of occupation on later health. Overall, the evidence points to limited, though heterogeneous, long term effects of health from blue collar employment.     

Changes in Firm Pension Policy: Trends Away from Traditional Defined Benefit Plans

In light of the recent concerns regarding the solvency of Social Security’s Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI), private pensions may play an increasingly important role in retirement welfare of US retirees. However, the private pension landscape has evolved in ways that may result in lower private pension wealth for retirees. One recent such phenomenon involves the conversion of traditional defined benefit pension plans to cash balance plans, which results in lower pension benefits for many workers. In this study, I investigated how characteristics of the firm’s workforce influenced whether the firm converted their traditional pension plan to a cash balance plan and how these characteristics related to the firm’s pension plan policy more generally. Using the Longitudinal Employer-Household Data and pension plan data from the Department of Labor/Internal Revenue Service and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, I found little evidence of workforce age distribution effects on the likelihood of DB plan conversion to a cash balance plan in the 1990s. More generally, I consistently found positive associations between firms with older and more female workforces and defined contribution plans during the same time.     

Explaining the move toward the market in US academic science: how institutional logics can change without institutional entrepreneurs

Organizational institutionalism has shown how institutional entrepreneurs can introduce new logics into fields and push for their broader acceptance. In academic science in the United States, however, market logic gained strength without such an entrepreneurial project. This article proposes an alternative “practice selection” model to explain how a new institutional logic can gain strength when local innovations interact with changes outside the field. Actors within a field are always experimenting with practices grounded in a variety of logics. When one logic is dominant, innovations based on alternative logics may have trouble gaining the resources they need to become more broadly institutionalized. But if a changing environment starts systematically to favor practices based on an alternative logic, that logic can become stronger even in the absence of a coherent project to promote it. This is what happened in US academic science, as growing political concern with the economic impact of innovation changed the field’s environment in ways that encouraged the spread of local market-logic practices.     

Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime,sex, and rights

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.     

The Nagorno Karabakh Conflict through the Prism of the Image of the Enemy

The post-Soviet space is fraught with multiple problems, risks and threats caused by unresolved conflicts. The vast majority of these conflicts possess a strong ethno-political component that complicates all the conflict resolution attempts: neglect of the role of ethnicity in interstate and intrastate conflicts can lead to overt conflict on the one hand and a deadlocked situation in respect to all mediation on the other hand. This article focuses upon the role and impact of ethnicity factor and the ways in which it is exploited and manipulated. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict serves as the major empirical case.     

Economic,Financial and Geopolitical Governance: USA,European Union and China

The paper examines the policies, choices, structural reforms, regulatory rules, corporate and public administration matching the world standards, openness, innovation, competitiveness, fulfillment of multilateral obligations, integration and regional approach achievements and international relations conditionality in the “Global Governance and Geopolitics” of the main economic, financial and policy issues, with special focus on the new regional approaches pursued by America, the European Union and Asia and the role of the emerging and transition countries. After the US Dollar, now the Eurozone is under pressure and the main Asian countries fear a contagion effect. While somebody proposes a slow devaluation of the Euro in order to soften the public deficits of the group of most exposed countries and restore more competitiveness to the real economy, political leaders are thinking to adopt indirectly the Euro two speeds operative monetary strategy, through the introduction of the majority vote, instead of the full Members consensus, for the most important decisions at the ECB in Frankfurt. Aside these monetary and institutional measures, the binding of the single national fiscal policy to more strict EU parameters of compatibility with the Eurozone sustainability appear unavoidable. This paper represents the background of my lecture given on November 4 at the Beijing Forum 2011 “The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All: Tradition and Modernity, Transition and Transformation” () at the PEK University.     

Choice of study discipline and the postponement of motherhood in Europe: The impact of expected earnings,gender composition,and family attitudes

Theory suggests that the field of study may be at least as consequential for fertility behavior as the duration and level of education. Yet, this qualitative dimension of educational achievement has been largely neglected in demographic studies. This article analyzes the mechanisms relating the field of study with the postponement of motherhood by European college-graduate women aged 20–40. The second round of the European Social Survey is used to assess the impact of four features of study disciplines that are identified as key to reproductive decision making: the expected starting wage, the steepness of the earning profile, attitudes toward gendered family roles, and gender composition. The results indicate that the postponement of motherhood is relatively limited among graduates from study disciplines in which stereotypical attitudes about family roles prevail and in which a large share of the graduates are female. Both the level of the starting wage and the steepness of the earning profile are found to be associated with greater postponement. These results are robust to controlling for the partnership situation and the age at entry into the labor market.     

Early life exposures and the occurrence and timing of heart disease among the older adult Puerto Rican population

Few studies have examined the effects of early life conditions on the timing of the onset of heart disease. We use the remarkable example of a representative sample of the population of older Puerto Ricans aged 60– 74 who lived in the countryside during childhood (n = 1,438) to examine the effects of seasonal exposures to poor nutrition and infectious diseases during late gestation on the timing of the onset and the probability of ever experiencing adult heart disease. Cox and log logistic hazard models controlling for childhood conditions (self-reported childhood health status and socioeconomic status [SES], rheumatic fever, and knee height) and adult risk factors (adult SES, obesity, smoking, texercise, and self-reported diabetes) showed that the risk of onset of heart disease was 65% higher among those born during high-exposure periods compared with unexposed individuals. However, there were no significant differences in median time of onset for those ever experiencing heart disease. As a comparison, we found that there were no significant seasonality effects for those who lived in urban areas during childhood. We conclude that early exposures in utero have important ramifications for adult heart disease among the older Puerto Rican population. We show, however, that while exposure is associated with the probability of ever experiencing adult heart disease, it is not associated with the timing of onset among those who do experience it.     

Health,wartime stress,and unit cohesion: Evidence from Union Army veterans

We find that Union Army veterans of the American Civil War who faced greater wartime stress (as measured by higher battlefield mortality rates) experienced higher mortality rates at older ages, but that men who were from more cohesive companies were statistically significantly less likely to be affected by wartime stress. Our results hold for overall mortality, mortality from ischemic heart disease and stroke, and new diagnoses of arteriosclerosis. Our findings represent one of the first long-run health follow-ups of the interaction between stress and social networks in a human population in which both stress and social networks are arguably exogenous.     

Knox meets Cox: Adapting epidemiological space-time statistics to demographic studies

Many important questions and theories in demography focus on changes over time, and on how those changes differ over geographic and social space. Space-time analysis has always been important in studying fertility transitions, for example. However, demographers have seldom used formal statistical methods to describe and analyze time series of maps. One formal method, used widely in epidemiology, criminology, and public health, is Knox’s space-time interaction test. In this article, we discuss the potential of the Knox test in demographic research and note some possible pitfalls. We demonstrate how to use familiar proportional hazards models to adapt the Knox test for demographic applications. These adaptations allow for nonrepeatable events and for the incorporation of structural variables that change in space and time. We apply the modified test to data on the onset of fertility decline in Brazil over 1960–2000 and show how the modified method can produce maps indicating where and when diffusion effects seem strongest, net of covariate effects.