INTERESTS
Demography, Infant Mortality, Fertility, Statistics and Methods
I have substantive interests in health disparities, with specific focus on the Hispanic infant mortality paradox and race/ethnic comparisons of change in infant mortality over time. Most of my substantive work is intertwined with my methodological interests in survival modeling, regression decomposition, and other methods. My current research revisits the Hispanic paradox in infant mortality and documents an erosion of the Mexican-origin infant survival advantage with increasing maternal age. I am extending this work to examine racial/ethnic differences in birth outcomes by maternal age as well as a decomposition of race/ethnic/nativity differences in infant mortality for women age 30 and older. In addition to the focus on the Hispanic paradox, my current research investigates race (black-white) differences in the sources of change in infant mortality using an age-period-cohort perspective. This work compares the infant mortality of non-Hispanic blacks and whites over a 20-year period. I consider maternal age, maternal birth cohort, and infant’s year of birth as three interrelated components of temporal change in infant mortality and find that period effects on mortality change outweigh cohort and age effects, but interesting patterns of narrowing racial mortality disparities emerge when examining more recent cohorts. On a methodological level, I elaborate on the nature and origins of the intrinsic estimator, which has gained popularity in recent years. I am also a statistical computing programmer (Stata and R) and have submitted a number of specialized algorithms for demographic analysis to the relevant journals, archives, and repositories.