Penn Population Studies Centers

The Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Pennsylvania has fostered research and training in population since its founding in 1962. The PSC has received support from a number of federal and private funding sources since its inception, including support from the NICHD. PSC Research Associates come from six schools at Penn and many different academic departments including, Sociology, Economics, Business, Nursing, and Medicine. The scale of research at the Population Studies Center ranges from macroeconomics and macro demography to human genetics and focus on understanding the dynamics of human populations and our research falls into the following research themes: New Dynamics of Population Diversity, Demography, Human Resources and Endowments, International Population Research and New Directions in Population Research. The PSC also houses the Graduate Group in Demography which trains Ph.D. students in Demography.   

The Population Aging Research Center (PARC) at the University of Pennsylvania has over 25 years of experience of creating the right setting for interdisciplinary research on the demography and economics of aging, including a focus on diverse and often underrepresented populations domestically and globally. PARC was established in 1994 with a grant from the National Institute on Aging. The overall research themes of PARC reflect the interests and expertise of our research associates. These include: Health Care and Long-Term Care in Older Adults, Cognition and Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD), Health Disparities in Aging, Early Life-Conditions and Older Adult Health, Behavior and Well-Being, and Global Aging and Health. PARC sponsors an annual Quartet Pilot Project Competition with 3 other centers at Penn, and a weekly seminar series in conjunction with the Population Studies Center, the Penn Population Studies Colloquium.

Interdisciplinary Centers, Units and Projects
 

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  • Publication
    Polypharmacy: Patterns And Policy Propositions
    (2020-01-01) Do, Duy Hoang
    Sixty percent of U.S. adults report frequent use of prescription medications, a prevalence that is higher than ever before. Although medications are lifesaving when used properly, they can produce side effects ranging from minor problems like dizziness to severe events such as an increased risk of cancer. Polypharmacy – a phenomenon typically defined as concurrent use of multiple medications – may present unique risks for medication side effects, amplifying the effects of each of the medication in a set. Given the growing medication use across the country, this dissertation examined the causes of polypharmacy and the consequences of concurrent use of medications with side effects on population health and health care use. The first chapter provided background information on polypharmacy and medication side effects. The second chapter used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to investigate whether and how the introduction of Medicare Part D, a large and sudden change to health care financing for Medicare beneficiaries, affected medication use for older adults. While Part D increased the use of lifesaving medications, it also increased polypharmacy. The third chapter used the NHANES to show that concurrent use of three or more medications with cognitive impairment side effects among U.S. older adults increased three-fold in the past two decades. Individuals who used three or more such medications experienced increased risks of cognitive deficits compared to non-users. The fourth chapter used the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to document a growth of 36% in the concurrent use of at least three medications with mental health side effects among U.S. adults in the past two decades. Concurrent use of these medications was associated with an increase in psychiatric symptoms and the use/costs of mental health services. In the fifth chapter, I discussed how the processes of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization contributed to rising medication use and disparities in such use, which in turn had implications for population-level health disparities. Collectively, these findings shed light on patterns and disparities in population health associated with polypharmacy and speak directly to the role of broader social, economic, cultural, and institutional inequalities in generating and maintaining health disparities.
  • Publication
    Influences on Children's Human Capital in Rural Malawi
    (2013-01-01) Appiah-Yeboah, Shirley Afua
    The circumstances that characterize poor, rural communities in Malawi suggest that children's health-wealth gradient can vary from other settings. This dissertation begins with a description of the methods used to create a household wealth variable using assets data in the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health project. By using a fixed effects model to minimize omitted variable bias, I determine the influence of participating in a farm subsidy program on the levels of household wealth in 2004, 2006 and 2008. The results show that the program is positively associated with the wealth index score and this association is stronger when using lagged explanatory variables. This chapter demonstrates how asset data broadens the possibilities of wealth-poverty research that can be undertaken in poor settings. In the next chapter, I use the wealth index to identify a health-wealth gradient for children under 5 years, and I determine whether the gradient varies with age. I find that children in wealthier households have decreased risk of stunting but this is not significant until the oldest age groups (36-47 and 48-59 months). While there is no apparent health-wealth gradient across these ages, there is evidence of an emerging gradient as children get older. The final chapter explores the role of maternal social capital in children's schooling outcomes, using an index measure of women's membership in community groups and instrument variable analysis to address endogeneity concerns. I find that maternal social capital has a significant, positive association with primary school enrollment for younger children and primary school completion for older children. In contrast, maternal social capital has significant, negative association with school enrollment for older children. Maternal social capital is discussed within the context of government policies to improve enrollment and retention. Poor, rural children in Malawi face unique circumstances that have long-lasting implications. The findings across these chapters underscore the need for research that contextualizes and seeks to understand these specific challenges. If this can be achieved, Malawian children have a better chance in becoming healthier, productive adults.
  • Publication
    International Trade Openness and Gender Gaps in Pakistani Labor Force Participation Rates Over 57 Years
    (2011-02-01) Hyder, Asma; Behrman, Jere R
    The extent of openness to international trade may alter incentives differentially by gender for labor force participation, particularly in economies in which gender differentials in human capital investments such as schooling are large and in which norms about gender behaviors are strong. This paper uses historical census data since 1951 and two recent Labor Force Surveys to investigate the impact of international trade openness on gender differences in labor force participation rates in broad occupational categories in Pakistan. The method used controls for average gender differences in these occupational categories and the unobserved factors that affect male and female labor force participation rates equally. The estimates indicate that increased international trade significantly reduces the gap between male and female labor force participation.
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  • Publication
    Three Essays on the Social, Economic, and Demographic Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility
    (2015-01-01) Anderson, Thomas Markley
    The demographic phenomenon of “low fertility” has received considerable attention over the last three decades within academic, political, and public spheres. While a large body of research has led to a deeper understanding of the underlying social and economic dimensions of low fertility, current theoretical and empirical approaches fail to explain puzzles pertaining to within and across population heterogeneity in fertility rates. This dissertation is comprised of three papers that investigate the social, economic, and demographic causes and consequences of low fertility. Chapter 1 sets forth a new theoretical approach to examining the interrelations between low fertility, socioeconomic development, and gender equity among developed countries. The main findings of this chapter are that 1) the pace and onset of socioeconomic development explain a significant proportion of the variation in fertility among developed countries, 2) low fertility may facilitate changes in gender norms through a “gender-equity dividend”, and 3) contrary to Second Demographic Transition theory, low fertility may be a transitory phase of the demographic transition. Whereas the Chapter 1 looks cross-nationally at gender and fertility dynamics, Chapter 2 takes a micro-level approach by exploring the relationship between fertility and gender norms in the United States. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 79), I find that both men and women with progressive views on gender equity have lower fertility than their traditional counterparts, though these results were stronger, more consistent, and more significant across models for women. In Chapter 3 I argue that the rising costs of childrearing through “shadow education” have become a key fertility-reducing force across high, medium, and low-income countries. To investigate this hypothesis, I use data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and find evidence of a “quality-quantity tradeoff” both within and across populations due to costly shadow education. Collectively, the findings of this dissertation signal that the causes and consequences of low fertility are multifaceted and evolving across time and space.
  • Publication
    The Long-Term Consequences of Family Planning in Old Age: Evidence from China's "Later, Longer, Fewer" Campaign
    (2019-05-20) Chen, Yi; Fang, Hanming
    Family planning plays a central role in contemporary population policies. However, little is known about its long-term consequences in old age. In this study, we examine how family planning policies implemented in China in the early 1970s affect the quality of life of the Chinese elderly forty years later. The direction of the effect is theoretically unclear. On the one hand, having fewer children allows parents to reallocate more resources to themselves, improving their well-being. On the other hand, having fewer children also leads to less care and companionship from children in old age. To empirically investigate the effect of family planning, we identify the causal impact by exploiting the provincial heterogeneity in implementing the "Later, Longer, Fewer" (LLF) policies in the early 1970s. We find that the LLF policies greatly reduced the number of children born to couples by 0.85. Parents also receive less support from children in terms of living arrangements, inter vivos transfers, and emotional support. Finally, we find that the impacts of the family planning policies on elderly parent's physical and mental well-being are drastically different: whereas parents who are more exposed to the family planning policies consume more and enjoy slightly better physical health status, they report more severe depression symptoms.
  • Publication
    Social Science Methods for Twins Data: Integrating Causality, Endowments and Heritability
    (2010-01-01) Kohler, Hans-Peter; Behrman, Jere R; Schnittker, Jason
    Twins have been extensively used in both economic and behavioral genetics to investigate the role of genetic endowments on a broad range of social, demographic and economic outcomes. However, the focus in these two literatures has been distinct: the economic literature has been primarily concerned with the need to control for unobserved endowments—including as an im¬portant subset, genetic endowments—in analyses that attempt to establish the impact of one vari¬able, often schooling, on a variety of economic, demographic and health outcomes. Behavioral genetic analyses have mostly been concerned with decomposing the variation in the outcomes of interest into genetic, shared environmental and non-shared environmental components, with recent multivariate analyses investigating the contributions of genes and the environment to the correlation and causation between variables. Despite the fact that twins studies and the recogni¬tion of the role of endowments are central to both of these literatures, they have mostly evolved independently. In this paper we develop formally the relationship between the economic and behavioral genetic approaches to the analyses of twins, and we develop an integrative approach that combines the identification of causal effects, which dominates the economic literature, with the decomposition of variances and covariances into genetic and environmental factors that is the primary goal of behavioral genetic approaches. We apply this new integrative approach to an illustrative investigation of the impact of schooling on several demographic outcomes such as fertility and nuptiality and health.
  • Publication
    “Golden Ages”: A Tale of the Labor Markets in China and the United States
    (2021-12-14) Fang, Hanming; Qiu, Xincheng
    We study the labor markets in China and the United States, the two largest economies in the world, by examining the evolution of their cross-sectional age-earnings profiles during the past thirty years. We find that, first, the peak age in the cross-sectional age-earnings profiles, which we refer to as the “golden age,” stayed almost constant at around 45-50 in the U.S., but decreased sharply from 55 to around 35 in China; second, the age-specific earnings grew drastically in China, but stayed almost stagnant in the U.S.; third, the cross-sectional and life-cycle age-earnings profiles were remarkably similar in the U.S., but differed substantially in China. We propose and empirically implement a decomposition framework to infer from the repeated cross-sectional earnings data the experience effect (i.e., human capital accumulation over the life cycle), the cohort effect (i.e., inter-cohort human capital growth), and the time effect (i.e., changes in the human capital rental prices over time), under an identifying assumption that the growth of the experience effect stops at the end of one’s working career. The decomposition suggests that China has experienced a much larger inter-cohort productivity growth and higher increase in the rental price to human capital, but lower returns to experience, compared to the U.S. We also use the inferred components to revisit several important and classical applications in macroeconomics and labor economics, including growth accounting and the estimation of TFP growth, and the college wage premium and skill-biased technical change.
  • Publication
    Substance Abuse during the Pandemic: Implications for Labor-Force Participation
    (2022-04-04) Greenwood, Jeremy; Guner, Nezih; Kopecky, Karen A.
    The labor-force participation rates of prime-age U.S. workers dropped in March 2020—the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—and have still not fully recovered. At the same time, substance-abuse deaths were elevated during the pandemic relative to trend indicating an increase in the number of substance abusers, and abusers of opioids and crystal methamphetamine have lower labor-force participation rates than non-abusers. Could increased substance abuse during the pandemic be a factor contributing to the fall in labor-force participation? Estimates of the number of additional substance abusers during the pandemic presented here suggest that increased substance abuse accounts for between 9 and 26 percent of the decline in prime-age labor-force participation between February 2020 and June 2021.
  • Publication
    A Sequence-Analysis Approach to the Study of the Transition to Adulthood in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    (2020-06-09) Sironi, Maria; Barban, Nicola; Pesando, Luca Maria; Furstenberg, Frank F.
    This study investigates whether young people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have experienced processes of de-standardization of the life course similar to those observed in high-income societies. We provide two contributions to the relevant literature. First, we use data from 263 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across 69 LMICs, offering the richest comparative account of women’s transition to adulthood (TTA) patterns in the developing world existing to date. In so doing, we shift the focus from individual life-course transitions towards a holistic approach that allows us to characterize the life-course complexity by detailed sequences of events, namely first sexual intercourse, first union, and first birth. Second, using a clustering algorithm based on optimal-matching distances of lifecourse sequences, we identify clusters of TTA and explore their changes across cohorts by region and urban/rural location of residence. Results stress the importance of investigating cross-regional differences in partnership and fertility trajectories by looking at the interrelation and complexity of status combinations. Summarizing the ensuing heterogeneity through four clusters, we document significant differences by macro-regions yet relative stability across cohorts. We interpret the latter as suggestive of cultural specificities that make the TTA resistant to change and slow to converge across regions, if converging at all.