Research

Dissertation

Paper 1: Early Life Parental Bereavement and Health Resilience: The Buffering Effect of Social Ties

Although adversities in early childhood are associated with excess child mortality and adverse health outcomes, there has been limited research on mitigating conditions that can attenuate the adverse health impacts. This study examines a particular adversity: the loss of a parent during early childhood, emphasizing the crucial role mothers play in survival. It highlights how social capital can buffer the negative impact of paternal loss to a greater extent than maternal loss on child survival in the United States between 1850 and 1950.
I use data from the genealogical database Familinx, matched to county-level geographical information to create indicators of community social capital and account for the role of family environment by conducting both sibling and cousins fixed effect models. The results show a significant gap in the magnitude of excess child mortality risk depending on whether the loss is paternal or maternal. While the effect of maternal bereavement (11%) is over twice as large as paternal bereavement (4%), social capital mainly buffers in the latter case. Independent of model specification, in high social capital contexts, the increased mortality risk following paternal loss is fully mitigated whereas the buffering effect of social capital is diluted in the case of maternal loss.


Paper 2: Social Capital as a Buffer Against Family Disruptions in Childhood: Comparative Evidence from Young Lives Study

Adversities in early life have been linked to adverse health outcomes as well as inequalities in social outcomes later in life.  Less studied is the extent to family social networks able mitigate the adverse outcomes caused by a shock to the parents ability to take care of the child. This paper will study the buffering effect of social networks in the context of developing countries taking advantage of the longitudinal nature of the Young Lives Study which encompasses Ethiopia, Vietnam, India, and Peru. This dataset provides rich information about different types of household shocks, their timing, and various indicators of social capital. Hence, I will examine the effects of social ties in various forms, including extended family members such as grandparents and close relatives, parental social networks outside of the family, civic participation, as well as broader community-level social capital. The outcomes of interest are physical health, subjective well-being, and measures of cognitive ability. To causally substantiate the results, I run sibling-models that exploit the timing differential of household shocks between siblings.


Paper 3: Bereavement effects in the past and social support (W/ Alberto Palloni)

We use a unique data set to assess the effects on mortality risks of individuals in intact couples and those to which are exposed the surviving member after the death of the spouse. The study of spousal bereavement effects on mortality risks has a long history but, as far as we know, there has never been an assessment of how these effects change over time and by birth cohorts. We use a unique geneaological dataset, Familinx, which is constructed by extracting family pedigrees from Geni.com (Kaplanis et al., 2018). This dataset provides valuable information about family characteristics, kinship ties, individuals’ lifespan, and residential location. To estimate bereavement effects, we use multistate hazard models and assess changes in the magnitude of those effects over time by focusing on the experience of marriage cohorts between 1750 to 1930 while keeping adequate representation. We also use aggregate measures of access to churches and neighborhood ethnicity to test the hypothesis that bereavement effects are considerably attenuated by a widow(er) social capital or social support. 


Work in progress