New paper on the link between parental and offspring longevity in the US

Posted on 10 February 2013 by Claus C Pörtner

My latest paper is on the relationship between how long your parents’ live/lived and your expected survival. Turns out that even with improve medical care, health knowledge, etc, you still cannot be too careful in choosing your parents. The longer your parents live, the lower is your mortality risk. The paper is joint with my former graduate student Edwin Wong. You can find the paper here and the abstract is below.

Studies of adult mortality typically examine the impact of individual characteristics, but ignore the fact that the characteristics of people closely linked to those individuals also influence mortality risk. This paper examines the effect of parental longevity on survival outcomes of adult offspring using survey data from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study (HRS) between 1992 and 2008. It employs a competing risk model that controls for correlation between individual death and survey non-response. There is strong evidence that individuals with longer-lived parents exhibit lower mortality risk. Even after controlling for health conditions and behavioral variables of the offspring, parental age at death has a substantial impact on the survival of the adult offspring, suggesting a strong genetic component that must be considered as important in determining longevity.

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New version of paper on family planning in Ethiopia available.

Posted on 2 January 2013 by Claus C Pörtner

A new version of my paper with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen on the effectiveness of family planning programs in Ethiopia is now available. You can find it here. The abstract is below.

Although reproductive health advocates consider family planning programs the intervention of choice to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of scepticism among economists as to their effectiveness, despite little rigorous evidence to support either position. This study explores the effects of family planning in Ethiopia using a novel set of instruments to control for potential non-random program placement. The instruments are based on ordinal rankings of area characteristics, motivated by competition between areas for resources. Access to family planning is found to reduce completed fertility by more than 1 child among women without education. No effect is found among women with some formal schooling, suggesting that family planning and formal education act as substitutes, at least in this low income, low growth setting. This provides support to the notion that increasing access to family planning can provide an important, complementary entry point to kick-start the process of fertility reduction.

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Full time research assistant needed

Posted on 5 December 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

I am looking for a full time graduate research assistant to work on a NSF funded project on human-computer interactions and economics. The tasks will include literature search and summary, help with running the project experiments, data management, statistical / econometrical analyses, and drafting of papers. For more information on the project and some of the planned work, please see our talk at Google, available on YouTube, or this website (search for HCI or look for the CHI proceedings paper).

The ideal candidate would have an interest in labor economics and/or IO, but the main requirement is quantitative skills and familiarity with Stata or other statistical software. Programming experience is preferred, but not require; the Computer Science graduate students on the project will be responsible for the main programming. The hope is that the successful candidate will be able to co-author and/or run experiments for their own research.

The position is for 20 hours a week and includes full tuition. The project is funded until 2014. The initial appointment will be for the next quarter with the possibility of extension if the work is satisfactory and the appointment will start at the beginning of the Winter quarter. The research assistant may be require to work at Seattle University for at least part of the time.

For further information or to submit an application, please contact me at cportner@seattleu.edu or at 206-651-4151. I will be making a decision during the week of the 17th.

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Talks on income shocks and timing of fertility

Posted on 4 December 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

I presented preliminary results from Shamma Alam and my work on “Income Shocks, Contraceptive Use, and Timing of Fertility” at University of Oregon in Eugene on 16 November and I will be presenting at the UW labor and development brown bag tomorrow at 12.30. The abstract for the paper is below.

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and fertility decisions. Using panel data from Tanzania, we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on contraception use, pregnancy, and the likelihood of childbirth. To account for unobservable household characteristics that potentially affect both shocks and fertility decisions we employ a fixed effects model. Households significantly increase their contraception use in response to income shocks from crop loss. This comes from an increased use of both traditional contraceptive methods and modern contraceptives. The poorer the household the stronger the effect of income shock on contraceptive use is. Furthermore, pregnancies and childbirth are significantly delayed for households experiencing a crop shock. For both pregnancy and childbirth the likelihood of delay as a result of shocks increases the poorer the household. We argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than income shocks’ effects on other factors that influence fertility, such as women’s health status, the absence or migration of spouse, and dissolution of partnerships.

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Rejection phobia

Posted on 1 December 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

This was originally aimed at literature writers but all the points hold equal well for academic writers: we writers are all expert liars. Here are the top 3 lies we tell ourself.

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Stata screencast on model validation using graphs

Posted on 25 October 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

The fourth episode of my Stata screencasts are now available at Vimeo. This episode looks at how to examine the homoskedasticity and normality assumptions using graphs. It also covers how to export graphs from Stata using menus or do-files. You can find it using the link above or simply by using the embedded video below.

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Well – it was bound to happen at one point!

Posted on 20 October 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

I finally caved and got myself a twitter account. You can see my tweets on the right or you can follow me by using this link:

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Third Stata screencast – this one on do-files

Posted on 7 October 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

The third screencast on Stata is now available. This one covers how to set up and run simple do-file. Do files are the preferred way to run collections of Stata commands. You can find it below:

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Second Stata screencast

Posted on 5 October 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

The next Stata screencast is now available. This one covers how to load data into Stata from Stata data files (.dta), Excel files, and comma separated data files.

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First screencast on Stata

Posted on 29 September 2012 by Claus C Pörtner

The first screencast on Stata is now available. It covers the basic layout of Stata and some simple commands. Comments and suggestions are appreciated. You can find the video below.

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