Economic inequality and social differentials in mortality

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 1, "Health status of children and households in poverty." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. This paper discusses health as a direct measure of economic well-being and draws attention to those suffering the worst outcomes. The author identifies a set of young people at particular risk of high mortality rates. She observes that in some U.S. communities - especially urban areas in the North - young people cannot expect to survive through middle-adulthood. Whites generally fare substantially better than African-Americans, yet whites in poor neighborhoods in northern cities experience mortality rates roughly comparable to those of African-Americans nationwide. Furthermore, among the urban African-American poor, mortality rates worsened relative to those of whites from 1980 to 1990. The author also indicates that circulatory disease - not homicide - has been the most important contributor to the higher mortality rates across all poor populations.Income distribution ; Medical care

The Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing Reconsidered

Teen childbearing is commonly viewed as an irrational behavior that leads to long-term socioeconomic disadvantage for mothers and their children. Cross-sectional studies that estimate relationships between maternal age at first birth and socioeconomic indicators measured later in life form the empirical basis for this view. However1 these studies have failed to account adequately for differences in family background among women who time their births at different ages. We present new estimates of the consequences of teen childbearing that take into account observed and unobserved family background heterogeneity, comparing sisters who have timed their first births at different ages. Sister comparisons suggest that previous estimates are biased by failure to control adequately for family background heterogeneity, and, as a result, have overstated the consequences of early fertility.

Fine Structure of the Zeros of Orthogonal Polynomials, II. OPUC With Competing Exponential Decay

We present a complete theory of the asymptotics of the zeros of OPUC with Verblunsky coefficients $\alpha_n = \sum_{\ell=1}^L C_\ell b_\ell^n + O((b\Delta)^n)$ where $\Delta <1$ and \abs{b_\ell} = b<1.Comment: Keywords: orthogonal polynomials, Jacobi matrices, CMV matrice

Weathering the Pandemic: Dying Old at a Young Age from Pre-Existing Racist Conditions

Mainstream social epidemiology now acknowledges the contributions of interpersonal racism, racialized stress, and implicit bias to population health inequity. It also increasingly recognizes that current and historical racist policies place barriers in the way of healthy lifestyles by institutionalizing food deserts, housing decay, and austerity urbanism. Essential as these developments are, they only skim the surface of how insidiously structural racism establishes and reproduces population health inequity. I coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of sustained cultural oppression upon the body. Weathering expands on the more conventional “social determinants of health” approach to understand the contextually fluctuating and historically structured and situated material, environmental and biopsychosocial stressors that wear-out the health of oppressed populations and shape their high effort coping strategies. I call this process “weathering” because that word is a contronym: Weathering can be a sign of deterioration and erosion as in “the rock was weathering;” and weathering can also be the opposite: A sign of strength and endurance as in “the family is weathering the recession.” For health and aging, it can be both

Asymptotics of orthogonal polynomials generated by a Geronimus perturbation of the Laguerre measure

This paper deals with monic orthogonal polynomials generated by a Geronimus canonical spectral transformation of the Laguerre classical measure for x in [0,?), ? > ?1, a free parameter N and a shift c<0. We analyze the asymptotic behavior (both strong and relative to classical Laguerre polynomials) of these orthogonal polynomials as n tends to infinity

Asymptotics of orthogonal polynomials and point perturbation on the unit circle

In the first five sections, we deal with the class of probability measures with asymptotically periodic Verblunsky coefficients of p-type bounded variation. The goal is to investigate the perturbation of the Verblunsky coefficients when we add a pure point to a gap of the essential spectrum. For the asymptotically constant case, we give an asymptotic formula for the orthonormal polynomials in the gap, prove that the perturbation term converges and show the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that the perturbation is of bounded variation. Then we generalize the method to the asymptotically periodic case and prove similar results. In the last two sections, we show that the bounded variation condition can be removed if a certain symmetry condition is satisfied. Finally, we consider the special case when the Verblunsky coefficients are real with the rate of convergence being c_n . We prove that the rate of convergence of the perturbation is in fact O(c_n). In particular, the special case c_n = 1/n will serve as a counterexample to the possibility that the convergence of the perturbed Verblunsky coefficients should be exponentially fast when a point is added to a gap.Comment: Published in the Journal of Approximation Theor

Behavioral Mechanisms in HIV Epidemiology and Prevention: Past, Present, and Future Roles

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72261/1/j.1728-4465.2009.00202.x.pd

Accumulating Disadvantage Over the Life Course: Evidence From a Longitudinal Study Investigating the Relationship Between Educational Advantage in Youth and Health in Middle Age

Recent studies suggest the importance of examining cumulative risk or advantage as potential predictors of health over the life course. Researchers investigating the cumulative health effects of education, however, have mainly conceptualized education in years or degrees, often disregarding educational quality and access to educational opportunities that may place individuals on divergent academic trajectories. We investigate whether educational advantages in youth are associated with an individual\u27s health trajectory. We develop a novel index of educational advantage and employ random-intercept modeling using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We find a widening health disparity in adulthood between respondents with greater and those with fewer educational advantages in youth. Further, among respondents with few educational advantages, blacks experience a greater health burden as they age compared to whites and Hispanics. These results suggest that differential access to educational advantages during youth may contribute to persisting health disparities in adulthood

WP 2018-389

Recent research has found, in some groups of Americans, dramatic increases in deaths due to drug overdose and suicide and an overall stagnation of trends toward increased longevity. This study examines the link between mortality of older working age (45 to 64) adults and local economic downturns in the U.S. to evaluate the role of economic shifts in various causes of death and their related mortality trends. Specifically, we estimate regression models to test the hypotheses that the longevity effects of poor economic prospects are reflected through (1) increased suicide, drug overdose, and other “deaths of despair” and (2) other causes of death linked to exposure to economic and social stress such as heart and cerebrovascular disease. To avoid the problem of endogeneity of local economic conditions to mortality conditions, we measure the local economic shock of lost employment with predicted employment based on baseline industrial composition and national trends in employment by industry. We find evidence consistent with prior research that among non-Hispanic white adults, midlife mortality has increased since 1990, particularly among those with low educational attainment. We also find that “deaths of despair” are important contributors to that trend. However, we find that while distress in local, area economies does predict increased mortality for chronic disease, it predicts decreased mortality from suicides, opioids, and other substance abuse. This finding suggests caution in the application of the construct of despair in explaining recent mortality patterns.Social Security Adminstration, Award number RRC08098401-10, R-UM18-07https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148126/1/wp389.pdfDescription of wp389.pdf : Working pape

CMV matrices in random matrix theory and integrable systems: a survey

We present a survey of recent results concerning a remarkable class of unitary matrices, the CMV matrices. We are particularly interested in the role they play in the theory of random matrices and integrable systems. Throughout the paper we also emphasize the analogies and connections to Jacobi matrices.Comment: Based on a talk given at the Short Program on Random Matrices, Random Processes and Integrable Systems, CRM, Universite de Montreal, 200