LDI research Seminar featuring Peter Ubel, MD "Whose Quality of Life Should Guide Policy?"

October 24, 2004
12:00 - 1:30 PM
Colonial Penn Center Auditorium
(co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract Biosketch
Paper
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Abstract
Approximately seven percent of children born in the US are less than 5 and a half pounds, the standard cut-off for being "low birth weight." Birth weight, in turn, has been associated with higher risk of numerous medical and developmental sequelae. Examining low birth weight would seem to provide an ideal heuristic for addressing issues of causality with respect to health and social status. The infant’s future SES cannot be causal of its health. Likewise, the infant’s health is not causal of the parents’ SES up to the time of birth (though, of course, it may be after that). However, when we view social inequality and health as having strong intergenerational components that affect one another, the story gets more complicated. Using the PSID, we use sibling comparisons to estimate an effect of income on birth weight and to estimate an effect of birth weight on adult educational attainment (19 years later). Sibling comparisons provide a methodology to factor out family-level unobserved heterogeneity to the extent that it is stable across pregnancies. We find birth weight is a strong predictor of high school graduation. We also find that income has no effect on birth outcomes for the vast majority of the population. But it does have a salutary effect for those who are medically at risk that is, whose parent(s) are also of low birth weight. We interpret this as a genetic-environmental interaction. We also attempt to develop a new methodology to estimate the genetic component of birth weight heritability that does not rely on MZ twins, adoptees or other samples that might be of dubious generalizability. Finally, we do use multiple births to examine the impact of fetal growth per se on infant mortality (as distinct from prematurity or other factors for which size may be acting as a proxy).

Biosketch:
Dalton Conley is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University and Director of NYU's Center for Advanced Social Science Research (CASSR). He is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He has taught at Yale and Princeton as well.

His scholarly research focuses on how socio-economic status is transmitted across generations and the public policies that affect that process. In this vein, he studies siblings differences in socioeconomic success, racial inequalities, the measurement of class and social status, and how health and biology affect (and are affected by) social position.

Conley is author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth and Social Policy in America (winner of the American Sociological Association 1997 Dissertation Award), Honky, a sociological memoir, and The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett). His latest book is, The Pecking Order : Which Siblings Succeed and Why (Pantheon Books, 2/2004).

He has received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. In addition to academic journals, Conley is a frequent contributor to mainstream media, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Salon, Le Monde Diplomatique and various other trade publications.