Higher birth order is associated with altered risk of many disease states, and Robin Bernstein explores this relationship in her manuscript that was recently published in Communications Biology titled “A Pregnancy And Childhood Epigenetics consortium (PACE) meta-analysis highlights potential relationships between birth order and neonatal blood DNA methylation”. An analysis of 16 birth cohorts demonstrated systematic DNA methylation variation in 341 regions of DNA, which highlights the potential for a reflection of birth order-related epigenomic states or changing disease incidence trends as fertility rates decrease worldwide.
Brian Cadena studies how labor demand shocks in the United States propogate across the border with Mexico in his paper that was recently featured in the Journal of International Economics titled “The International Transmission of Local Economic Shocks Through Migrant Networks.” He and his coauthors find that a decline in U.S. employment due to the Great Recession (2007-2009) caused increased return migration, decreased emigration, and declined remittance receipt in Mexican locations with strong initial ties to the hardest hit U.S. migrant destinations.
David Pyrooz examines how the COVID-19 pandemic changed U.S. prison operations in his recently published paper “The COVID-19 Pandemic and Operational Challenges, Impacts, and Lessons Learned: a Multi-methods Study of U.S. Prison Systems” featured in Health & Justice. With his coauthors, he finds that daily operations were strained, particularly in the areas of staffing, implementing public health policy efforts, and sustaining correctional programming, and they attempted to address complex problems with limited resources.
Stefanie Mollborn has recently published two papers! The first, “‘Mature Enough to Handle It?’ Gendered Parental Interventions in and Adolescents’ Reactions to Technology Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic”, published in the Journal of Family Issues, investigates how teenagers react to parental regulation of technology. The second, ”Distinction through Distancing: Norm Formation and Enforcement during the COVID-19 Pandemic”, published by Social Science & Medicine, studies disparities in adherence to social distancing in two higher-resource communities in the U.S.
Daniel Simon published a chapter of his dissertation (with advisor Ryan Masters) titled “Institutional Failures as Structural Determinants of Suicide: The Opioid Epidemic and the Great Recession in the United States” in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. They find that women’s suicide rates from poisoning increase with prescription drug availability, and non-poisoning suicide rates among all adult Americans track strongly with worsening economic conditions coinciding with the financial crash and the Great Recession.
Sharon DeWitte explores the disproportionately high mortality of healthy young adults during the 1918 influenza pandemic in her PNAS publication “Frailty and survival in the 1918 influenza pandemic.” Using skeletal data, she finds that frail or unhealthy individuals were more likely to die during the pandemic than those who were not frail, a result that contradicts prior assumptions about selective mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic. These findings provide depth to our understanding of how variation in life experiences can impact morbidity and mortality even during a pandemic caused by a novel pathogen.
Tania Barham recently had two papers accepted for publication! The first, “Experimental evidence from a conditional cash transfer program: schooling, learning, fertility, and labor market outcomes after 10 Years,” is forthcoming in Journal of the European Economic Association and explores a conditional cash transfer program in Nicaragua. She and her coauthors find that variation in timing of access to nutrition, health and education led to differential impacts on learning for men and reproductive health outcomes for women. Forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources, “No place like home: long-run impacts of early childhood health and family planning on labor and migration outcomes,” examines the long-term effects of early childhood interventions on adult labor market and migration outcomes in Bangladesh.