DIAL

In Episode 11 of the DIAL Podcast, Dilnoza Muslimova from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam talks about birth rank, genes and how well children get on in life and whether and how parental investment matters.

Birth rank, genes and later life outcomes was presented at the DIAL Mid Term Conference in June 2019 and is part of the NORFACE-funded project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities.

Transcript

In Episode 11 of the DIAL Podcast, Dilnoza Muslimova from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam talks about birth rank, genes and how well children get on in life and whether and how parental investment matters.

Birth rank, genes and later life outcomes was presented at the DIAL Mid Term Conference in June 2019 and is part of the NORFACE-funded project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities.

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode we're talking about birth rank, genes and how well children get on in life. And whether and how parental investment matters. Our guest is Dilnoza Muslimova from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who is also a member of the DIAL research project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities. She started by explaining the background to her research.

Dilnoza Muslimova 0:28

We're very interested in how parental time investments interplay with the genetic endowment of children and how those parental time investments can overcome the genetic disadvantages that children have. So in that respect birth rank speaks a lot about the family environment. And yeah, it can be whether you have your older siblings, it can be whether I don't know how much time your parents spent with you, or like, generally, what is the attention that you're receiving, and we were taught that by the literature that talks a lot about parental time investment and the birth rank, couple of studies, they find that for example, children who are born later to the family. They receive on average about 20 to 30 minutes less of parental time being at the same age as their older siblings. And we thought that it's quite interesting to explore another study also finds this, that gap, siblings have in education and IQ, from the older sibling to the later sibling is almost half of this gap explained by parental time investments.

Christine Garrington 1:36

Everybody's interested in this whole sort of nature nurture debate I think but it's really challenging to get information about or data about people's genetics, and the life they lead. Where do you get your information from for this particular study that you're doing?

Dilnoza Muslimova 1:52

We were quite lucky that we got funding and were obtaining access to several biobanks and biobank is basically the data storage of all the genetic information, and also biomarkers. Biomarkers are blood measures, and saliva measures, urine samples and so on. I have actually visited one myself in the Netherlands. It was very interesting to observe how they store it as biological samples for individuals at minus 80 degrees Celsius in the freezers, and some freezers are actually quite advanced enough to make it it's quite exciting to see how people are very invested and want to obtain very much like evidence based research and have precise measures of your health and your genetic information.

Christine Garrington 2:42

And we're talking about lots of people right? Lots of people.

Dilnoza Muslimova 2:44

Yeah, for the UK biobank that we're using in our study it's 500,000 people and it's amazing because the larger the sample, the more precise, or more representative our results are. So yeah we're quite lucky and another advantage of this biobank, is that they also survey people. In the same data set, you can find their health and genetic information but also their life outcomes; their income, their educational attainment and this allows a lot of prospects for research.

Christine Garrington 3:15

Like you say an incredible resource, incredible. So what aspects of participants' genetic makeup, did you look at specifically? You have said some of the things that are available in the, in the biobank, what sorts of things do you look at and what were you able to tell from those?

Dilnoza Muslimova 3:31

When we talk about genetic endowments, it's a bit tricky because it's not like the whole genetic endowment that we look at. The saliva is collected from an individual, and then the genetic material in saliva is genotype, basically, your gene is coded 99% of the code is very similar to other people. It's what makes us human. Like what gives us two legs, two arms and so on. And one percent is different, and it makes us more individual. We look at this 1% variation between individuals and their genome wide association studies, which try to analyse how this variation predicts life outcomes for example, education, IQ. There are very particular things like, I don't know preference for tea. Yeah but we tried to focus on more established robust variants such as education and IQ, and the recent studies established that the variation explained by genes is almost the same as variation explained by income in education. So, it's about 10 or 12% of variation in your outcome. We look at that specific aspect of the genetic information of an individual.

Christine Garrington 4:45

So in simple terms, then what were you able to establish about birth ranks? So where brothers and sisters come in terms of order that they're born, and what that meant for someone's IQ level and educational attainment later on? Which is what you were keen to try to establish.

Dilnoza Muslimova 5:02

So aside of adding genetic information we established, we managed to replicate the earlier studies that show birth rank is negatively correlated with individuals' IQ and individuals' educational attainment, which is like the later you're born, that lowers your education or IQ. But interestingly, there is no association between your genetic potential and birth rank. It means that a lot of variation, like a lot of causes are more environmental than genetic

Christine Garrington 5:37

So it's more to do with what happens after you are born in the family environment?

Dilnoza Muslimova 5:42

Exactly, yep because there is no difference in the potential between the siblings at conception. So that's very interesting.

Christine Garrington 5:49

Yeah that's a really important message isn't it? And so tell us about some of the other key things that you've found so far?

Dilnoza Muslimova 5:55

Well the other finding that we find is basically that children who are disadvantaged genetically. So they have lower than average polygenic risk score recorded for education, or IQ, they're more hampered by being born later. So, in other words, this finding translates into if we bridge it with parental time investments that it might be quite difficult for children with lower genetic endowment for education to catch up with their siblings, if they have lower parental investment. Basically what advantages about genes and birth they are both random within families. So, your genetic endowment is fixed at conception and it is randomly assigned based on your parental genes and your birth rank is also randomly assigned at your birth so you don't choose your preference. It is not chosen by someone, it's just a random. So when you look at the interaction of the birth rank and your genetic endowment .This is what we find that people who are weaker genetically, or who have lower genetic potential, if they were born later than they have even lower educational attainment or IQ, later in life.

Christine Garrington 7:04

Now, it is important to be clear about what these findings don't imply as much as what they do. So tell us first about how we should interpret them.

Dilnoza Muslimova 7:13

I think it's very important to make clear that we do not mean that people who are born later are genetically disadvantaged. So it is very clear and this is one of the findings that we empirically confirm that they are not an genetically disadvantaged. Another thing that is also very important to make clear is that we do not mean genetic or environmental determinism - genes do not determine your whole life course. And at the same time environment does not determine all your lifecourse. It's very complex interplay between the two. So you cannot, I think we do not propagate labelling people based on their genes or based on their family environment created.

Christine Garrington 7:57

Now its early days, I think that is another thing you are keen to stress, early days in the research, but what would you say that we've learned so far? Because it seems that you have found a lot already. And why is it important we really get to grips with it and understand it? Especially in this context of inequality and wanting to close the gaps between, you know those people who might struggle in life and those people advantaged in some way.

Dilnoza Muslimova 8:22

I think what we learn from the study, is a lot of previous literature, talk about children's endowments and how they interplay with the environment. But very few papers actually measured the endowments, and some of the measurements are mostly like birth weight. And birth weight is affected by prenatal parental investment so you don't know what is causing what. And the advantage of our study is that both measures that we use are independent of each other and his allows us to measure the contribution of each aspect of nature and nurture. So that's very interesting and very important. Yeah, and basically I underlined again what we found is that genetical disadvantage children are hampered even more great by fewer parental investments when it comes to their life long outcomes.

Christine Garrington 9:13

Birth rank, genes and later life outcomes is research presented at the DIAL midterm conference in June 2019 by Dilnoza Muslimova. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

In Episode 10 of the Dial Podcast, Michael Grätz from the University of Stockholm talks about sibling similarity in income and what that tells us about their life chances later on. The research, which uses Administrative Data in Sweden and is published as a Working Paper, was also presented at the DIAL mid term conference in June 2019.

Transcript

Michael Grätz: Siblings and their incomes – the same or different over the life course?

In Episode 10 of the Dial Podcast, Michael Grätz from the University of Stockholm talks about sibling similarity in income and what that tells us about their life chances later on. The research, which uses Administrative Data in Sweden and is published as a Working Paper, was also presented at the DIAL mid term conference in June 2019.

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're talking about sibling similarity and income over the lifecourse and across generations. Our guest is Michael Grätz from the University of Stockholm he started by explaining by looking at siblings can help us better understand how much their background and circumstances influence how they get on later in life.

Michael Grätz 0:25

So what we are interested in estimating how much the family and community background of an individual influences his and her life chances. And the siblings approach is one way to try to do that. And so siblings share many characteristics; they have the same parents, they live in the same neighbourhood, they often go to the same schools and all these factors are taking into account if we estimate how similar brothers are and how similar sisters are.

Christine Garrington 0:55

So in this piece of research what specifically did you want to look at and why?

Michael Grätz 0:59

So the siblings similarities approach many others have used before us. The new thing is what we are doing is we are taking a lifecourse perspective. So what we are mainly interested is whether siblings similarities varies over the lifecourse. So on the one hand there is this idea that genetic effects become stronger over the lifecourse, there is also what Christopher Chang has called luck, so there are random life events happening and they might happen more the older people become. So from that perspective you would expect that siblings become less similar to each other over the lifecourse. But there is also this idea in Sociology that there is a process of cumulative advantage. And from that perspective you would think that siblings are becoming more similar the longer they are in the labour market.

Christine Garrington 1:47

And where did you get your information from?

Michael Grätz 1:49

So what we are using here are papers and administrative data from Sweden. So this is tax data, actually tax records and statistics, Sweden has collected them and made them available for researchers dating back to 1968. And for that reason we can for the oldest cohort in our study - for those born in 1950s we can actually cover their income between age 18 and 60 meaning we have income information on them, on their earnings and on their income, age of 18 to age 60 every single year.

Christine Garrington 2:22

And what else about this data is good? Obviously it has got the sort of information you want but presumably its huge as well right? It covers everybody? Is that right?

Michael Grätz 2:29

Well it covers the Swedish population so it is covering everyone who reported their earnings and their income who reported their earnings and income to the tax authorities in that specific year.

Christine Garrington 2:39

So in that sense it is a really good source of data for you? So what was the overall picture when you compared the incomes of siblings over their lives first and foremost?

Michael Grätz 2:48

So what stands out is that sibling correlations are definitely highest when they are youngest. So age 20, and 25 when you test the effect that siblings often take the same educational pathways. So meaning if they both go to university. They have low income at the beginning. If they take up some vocational education or they start work and they are lucky they have a higher income at the beginning but then of course they don't have the income development that people have to go to university. If you look at the further lifecourse then it really depends on how we measure the information. So if you look at income at a specific age we find a decrease over the lifecourse. Meaning that siblings become more different. They become more different to each other. But if we are accumulating income meaning we are adding up the income made from one year to another, we actually find that siblings are becoming more similar in their correlated income to each other. This is not very strong but this is what we slightly find so there is a kind of U shape pattern meaning that their overall income at the end of life shows actually siblings are more similar than what was previously also thought in the literature.

Christine Garrington 3:57

And did it matter whether those siblings were brothers or sisters?

Michael Grätz 4:00

So it does matter for the level in the sense that the effect of family background on income was lower for women than for men. This is what other studies have also found. That is what we find here. Meaning we find lower statistical correlations and higher product correlations but the development over the lifecourse is the same for women and for men.

Christine Garrington 4:22

And what about if you came from a poorer background or a richer background? Did that matter in some way?

Michael Grätz 4:26

So this is an interesting question because that there is good reason to suspect it should matter. So we are referring to the work by Bolton Connolly from Princeton University who had this idea that families who have a lot or resources are investing that in a way to make their siblings more similar and that we should also find that families from advantaged backgrounds should have more similar siblings. So there should be these differences and he actually also found these differences in one study in the United States. So this is what motivated us trying to replicate his results but we did not find evidence for this. So this is not the case. Even though there are good reasons to expect, it doesn't affect whether siblings are, the level of sibling similarity depending on from which background they are from.

Christine Garrington 5:18

Can I ask what you make of that? Out of interest? Why the difference? Any thoughts?

Michael Grätz 5:24

Yeah so maybe parental investments are not that important after all. So either, or parents don't, if they are compensating in the way we presume they are not compensating enough. It at least not make the income of their siblings more similar. Or they maybe compensating with wealth transfers, so direct transfers. Which is not something which we are not observing in this study.

Christine Garrington 5:51

Now you looked across three different cohorts born in the 50s, 60s and 70s how did the picture differ between those cohorts?

Michael Grätz 5:58

Okay to be honest that is not the very long historical perspective just having three cohorts so from them we find stability which is also what other studies have found before us. But from when we do find a change, and the change goes in the way that sisters become more similar because the three cohorts so the family background impact increases. And what this means at least that the kind of increasing female integration into the labour market and increasing gender equality is associated with a stronger effect of family background, meaning that it has mainly advantaged women who profit at least first from this increasing gender equality.

Christine Garrington 6:41

And what have you learned about sibling incomes that we didn't know before then? And what are the important takeaways would you say from this?

Michael Grätz 6:49

What we are claiming that our study shows is that it is really important to take this lifecourse perspective. And the main takeaway from this whole field of stratification research is the message that it is important to take a long, as long information lifecourse as possible. And it is important to accumulate income over, over many years. So the overall level of sibling similarity that we find for both brothers and sisters is much higher if we are looking at the whole lifecourse aged 18 to 60. And add up all this information than if we just look at five years of the lifecourse, or 10 years of the lifecourse, which is what most previous research has done. And we think that this is, this is of course speculation now but this insight is due not only for our study but the whole inequality that it is very important to take this lifecourse perspective and probably also in other countries than Sweden.

Christine Garrington 7:50

Sibling Similarity and Income: a Lifecourse Perspective is research presented at the DIAL midterm conference in June 2019 by Michael Grätz. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

In Episode 9 of the DIAL Podcast, Nirosha Varghese from Bocconi University discusses her research looking at the links between early childhood sleep and how children get on at school later on.

Further information:

Early childhood sleep and later cognitive human capital is Marie Curie funded research analysing the relationship between early sleep problems and later cognitive outcomes in a life course perspective. It was presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

Transcript

Nirosha Varghese: Sleep tight! Does a baby's sleep matter for how they get on at school later on?

In Episode 9 of the DIAL Podcast, Nirosha Varghese from Bocconi University discusses her research looking at the links between early childhood sleep and how children get on at school later on.

Further information:

Early childhood sleep and later cognitive human capital is Marie Curie funded research analysing the relationship between early sleep problems and later cognitive outcomes in a life course perspective. It was presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In today's episode we're talking about children and sleep and asking if sleep problems in very young children might negatively affect how they get on in reading, writing and maths later on. Our guest is Nirosha Varghese from Bocconi University, who started by explaining the background to her research.

Nirosha Varghese 0: 26

So, we know that previous studies show that what happens in early life has consequences for later on. But then all the studies that have looked into it usually looks at factors like parent and ACS income, or like exogenous shocks like the recession or war, or earthquake, but none of these studies has looked at sleep as a shock. So, what we're trying to do here is taking evidence from medical literature, which shows that there are adverse effects of sleep problems on cognition and trying to study it from a life course perspective and moreover, although there are some studies that are done in the US, but it has not been done in a European context, and also not from a life course perspective

Christine Garrington 1:08

So, tell us a bit about where you got your information from or where you are getting your information from.

Nirosha Varghese 1:14

So, this information comes from ALSPAC, which is the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. It's also known as the 'Children of 90s data', because it's a cohort for children born in the 90s, so they initially selected pregnant women who were supposed to give birth in a period of one year, one to one and a half years, and that's where the data comes from. It's geographically limited to Avon and because of this we have a very rich data set. So, we have information on pre-natal characteristics which is really important. The sample is 14,500 approximately.

Christine Garrington 1:48

So, a really big useful data set, but what sorts of things were the mothers asked about in ALSPAC that helped you examine these questions about sleep and how children get on as they get older?

Nirosha Varghese 1:59

So first of all, we have sleep measures and here, they're using sleep subjective sleep measures not objective. So here they asked if the children continuously woke up every few hours during the sleep. So, we use that and we use a very similar measure which is like the children wake up during the night. So this is measured all the way from 18 months, like 1.5 years, until 7.5 years. So we have seven points in time. We also have measures on cognition, including IQ, short term memory, some measures for math and English standardised scores and so on. We also have measures on non-cognition, which is coming from standard difficulties questionnaire on behavioural difficulties, social fears and so on. And most importantly we can control for a lot, a lot of covariates including prenatal characteristics and socioeconomic characteristics.

Christine Garrington 2:55

So, what have you done with all of this fantastic information?

Nirosha Varghese 2:58

So first of all, we looked at the relationship between different patterns of childhood exposure to sleep and its effects on cognition. So, already we know that there's a negative effect, but we want to know if the timing of that sleep problem actually makes a difference. So, it could be that a sleep problem at 1.5 years is all that matters and sleep problems at five years doesn't matter. So, if you actually do an intervention at five years, it doesn't make sense. So, this is what we are doing, because we have a longitudinal data, we test for different kinds of models. Once we know which model fits the data better we try to see if there are some scarring effects of sleep. So, this past sleep matters, even when controlling for the current status of sleep problem and we also try to understand some of the mechanisms underlying this relationship.

Christine Garrington 3:49

Yes, so what's going on behind the scenes, yes indeed. So from what you've found so far does when a child is experiencing sleep problems as you said, the timing of this, matter, and if so, how does it matter?

Nirosha Varghese 4:01

So, what we find it that it's not per se the timing that matters. It is the duration of exposure. So, the longer you're exposed to sleep problems, the larger the effect on cognition. So, what this means is that this is very similar to what Heckman in his work says that the earlier the investment the better, so if you do the intervention when the child is young, because then you can shape the child's skills or problems much more better. Better in terms of cost and in terms of the effects that you want. Since there's a link between infant's sleep and childhood sleep, it's better to do the intervention earlier on, so that's what we find.

Christine Garrington 4:39

Indeed. Now whether one thing causes another directly is always a bit of a tricky area to claim, but what are you able to say so far would you say?

Nirosha Varghese 4:48

So, we cannot establish causality, but what we can say is that there is a negative effect, negative association and this actually, we see that it's a cumulative effect. We also see that there is a scarring that suggests that early intervention is better.

Christine Garrington 5:03

Tell us a bit more about that scarring effect and first perhaps explain by scarring effect, what do we mean and what did you find when you looked at it?

Nirosha Varghese 5:13

So scarring effect is usually used in unemployment and well-being literature. So, what it says is that even when you control for current employment status, so even if you're employed at the moment, past unemployment can actually have scarring effects on a well-being. So, we adapted it into this literature so what we see is that, even if it's you sleep now, can past sleep problems have an impact on cognition? What we find is that even if you sleep well now or whatever your status of sleep is, past exposure to sleep problems, the duration, higher the duration, worsens the effect on cognition.

Christine Garrington 5:47

What do we learn from your findings would you say so far and how can the research that you've done help those of us who are key whether it's parents or policymakers, teachers all of those interested in the well-being of children help ensure that they get the best possible start in life because that's what we're aiming for really isn't it?

Nirosha Varghese 6:05

So, I think the main takeaway is, when to do the intervention and what we find is exactly resonating with that. So, both the evidence on cumulative sleep problems, and on scarring effects calls for early intervention. So, it could be either in terms of healthy sleep behaviours when you're young like no screen time after you go to bed, or going to bed at the right time, sleeping proper amount of time. If children are taught how to do it properly, then this can be like lifelong habits, and there are also sleep clinics, so if infants have problems in sleeping, then it's better to take them to the clinics where they're taught how to sleep better. Also, the fact that behavioural difficulties in childhood is coming from sleep problems, it could be one of the channels. Since these problems also happened in the childhood and these are also malleable, as in you can shape them, this also shows that there is a scope for intervention during mid-childhood, as well as for behavioural difficulties.

Christine Garrington 7:05

So, the simple message is getting there really early with your children, get them into good habits, sleep is really important in the longer term. If you're struggling get help presumably as well. So where does your research go from here then?

Nirosha Varghese 7:20

So, the next step is to establish causality. So, causality in terms of the relationship between sleep, accumulative acts of sleep on cognition and also the causality between infants' sleep to mid-childhood sleep. So once we know that there is a causality between early sleep to late sleep then we know that we probably have to do the intervention earlier on for sure.

Christine Garrington 7:42

`Early childhood sleep and later cognitive human capital is Marie Curie funded research presented at the DIAL mid-term conference in June 2019 by Nirosha Varghese. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

In Episode 8 of the DIAL Podcast, Dr Áine Ní Léime from the National University of Ireland talks about her research looking at the work trajectories of people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs and what that means for their health as they approach retirement in a policy context where they are expected to work longer.

Áine is a member of the DIAL programme of research DAISIE project which is using similar methods and approaches to those discussed in this podcast to look at the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life (EWL) in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

Transcript

Áine Ní Léime: The road to retirement – is it an equal one for people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs?

In Episode 8 of the DIAL Podcast, Dr Áine Ní Léime from the National University of Ireland talks about her research looking at the work trajectories of people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs and what that means for their health as they approach retirement in a policy context where they are expected to work longer.

Áine is a member of the DIAL programme of research DAISIE project which is using similar methods and approaches to those discussed in this podcast to look at the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life (EWL) in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the life course. In today's episode, we're asking about the road to retirement, what influences people to take up a physically demanding or sedentary job, and how that plays out as we reach traditional retirement age. Our guest is Áine Ní Léime from the National University of Ireland. She starts by explaining some of the policy context around people being expected to work for longer and the potential pinch points associated with those policies.

Áine Ní Léime 0:28

People are living longer, populations are ageing in several European countries and the response to that, or one response to that, has been by the OECD and the EU, to introduce policies designed to extend working lives. So that's fine and seems very benign and so on. But when you look at that a bit more closely, especially from a gender perspective, which a group of us researchers, were involved in gender based research, and it seemed to us that changing the lens of working lives was going to have some kind of impact on women in particular, because they already had inequalities in terms of pensions, they tend to have lower pensions – there are pension gaps in every country - so we're interested to see what is the impact of extending working lives on you know, a situation that's already unequal. Another issue that seemed likely, again, we didn't know the beginning of the research was followed by people who were in physically demanding jobs, if they suddenly have to work longer, what's that going to do to them? Another emerging area of research, which only kind of became obvious as the research progressed, is that people tend to be in more precarious jobs at the moment and into the future. So again, what impact is that going to have as they have to lengthen their working lives?

Christine Garrington 1:57

On that note, as far as Ireland is concerned, I'm quite interested to know what's the situation there with respect to state pension age and any of the policies that have been brought in there and in recent years that relate to this?

Áine Ní Léime 2:10

Okay, yeah, because my presentation today was based in Ireland, so state pension age in Ireland was 65 until 2014 when the rules have increased to 66 for both men and women. It is going up to 67, in 2021 and 68, in 2028, which is quite a steep rise, considering that the population age 65 and over is relatively low and Ireland is quite a young country. It's in and around 13% at the moment, where, you have other countries that are up at 18 and 22%, so it seemed quite, in some ways, drastic, almost increase, certainly very steep.

Christine Garrington 2:54

Yes like you say big changes have been taking place, and in order to look more closely at these issues, what exactly have you been doing?

Áine Ní Léime 3:02

This project that I've been working on, was designed to look at different groups of people to compare men and women and to look at people in three different occupational types. So the first was physically demanding work, and that is obviously physically demanding work, so healthcare workers who often have to lift patients or clients as opposed to cleaners or janitors in the United States, and people involved in construction or you know, any, any job that is physically, obviously demanding. Another group were teachers, so they could be secondary school or primary school teachers and the third group then were academics whose work is not obviously physically, physically demanding in the same way as say cleaners would be.

Christine Garrington 3:53

One of the things you did was to create profiles of these different types of people who went into what sorts of jobs. So what sorts of people went into teaching them what sorts of people went into the more physically demanding jobs that you're talking about in the healthcare sector and what sorts of things influenced them in in those directions?

Áine Ní Léime 4:10

It was generally people who have left school at an early age, this is in particular to Ireland anyway, and many of them had left school at age 13, 14 and 15. They often came from families who are not well off, and maybe had a large number of children, and they often were the older children in the family. So they left, they specifically said because they had 13 children and we needed the money so they never got an opportunity to finish secondary school or certainly not to go to college. Then the teachers on the other and they were really strongly encouraged by their parents to stay on at school, get an education and get a job, which was just this huge push to do that those were the main differences.

Christine Garrington 5:01

When you looked at the health of your participants, what sorts of things cropped up in relation to their sort of working lives once they were into their late 60s?

Áine Ní Léime 5:10

Even earlier, for many of the care workers, they tended to have, to follow up with, say chronic conditions in their back/with relation to the backs, who had injured their knees or their feet and their hips - those were the main ones. Well, the interesting thing from our perspective was that it was work related. Many of these were caused from their work, whereas some of the teachers, a small number of teachers would have ill health, but it was not work related, it might be cancer or heart disease, something like that.

Christine Garrington 5:49

Yes something that wasn't specifically related to their day-to-day job as it were. Now we tend to think of teaching as one of those professions, it's very much a job for life, whereas being a janitor or cleaner or health worker, as you said, might be slightly more precarious work. I wonder if that was born out in the interviews that you did? Did you get a feel for that?

Áine Ní Léime 6:09

That is true, although I do think it's beginning to change. It was very much the case. there are a few differences again, because say the healthcare workers, if they were working for the government, they might have a good contracts/stable contracts, ut if they were working for private healthcare companies, they really had no guarantees about, even their hours for the following week. And one of the things that could happen to them was that their clients might have to go to a nursing homes if their health got worse, or, or they might die, or, you know, but they would be suddenly left without an income, you know, without substantial pieces of income for the following couple of months or whatever. So that had a big effect on their ability to pay consistently into a private pension, which is what the government is now recommending that people do. The government in Ireland it has increased the minimum number of contributions you need to get a state contributory pension, so that definitely it does affect it yes.

Christine Garrington 7:17

Interesting. And when you asked your participants about what they thought about, sort of the recent changes in policy and having to work longer for example, what sorts of things did they tell you?

Áine Ní Léime 7:28

Some of them were surprised, they didn't even realise that this was happening, but most in all groups, most of the workers totally disagreed with the extension of working life. Well, they disagreed with it being compulsory, which is what they see it as being, and I suppose in effect it is because if the State Pension age is increased they have no income unless they go on Job Seekers' Allowance which they think is also impossible to get a job at age 66. Most people's jobs are subject to contract law in Ireland and that ends at 65 at the moment. If State Pension Age increases this gap where people are suddenly left without an income and without a job. So yeah, most people disagreed with this raise of the State Pension Age. They felt it would be okay if it was not compulsory you know, if it was a choice, cecause some people do want to live longer.

Christine Garrington 8:22

What would you say then are the main points to emerge from the research and what would be the implications for policy to your mind?

Áine Ní Léime 8:30

Okay, well I suppose the most obvious one, first there is the impact on people in physically demanding jobs and that would be both men and women. The government needs to think of some way of addressing that, so perhaps it could be to have people in physically demanding jobs could retire earlier, and there is a sort of precedent for that with firefighters and you know, the army and the police, the guards or guardi we call them. They do retire early. That doesn't extend at the moment to people in other more generally sort of physically demanding work. So I think that's definitely something that needs to be addressed. How exactly they do it I'm not sure, but they could as somebody suggested today, limit it to a certain number of years, rather than linking to age. Thaat might be one approach, because one of the issues that people raised was that they had often started work ate age 13, 14, 15, so they'd already worked for 50 years. So it was very much this perception, 'I don't want to die at work', so they wanted a few years of being able to have a pension and just relax a bit.

Christine Garrington 9:50

Yes that's quite a, quite a striking and strong message, isn't it indeed? So where does your research go from here, you mentioned earlier about the comparisons you are doing with the US, where does all of this work go?

Áine Ní Léime 10:01

I'm involved in a new project, which is the DAISIE project funded by NORFACE and that involves researchers from five different countries, so there is the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. We're looking at people in different occupations. One is transport, finance and health, but it is nurses this time. It's an advancement of this research, because it's not only workers that we are interviewing, but also people we call experts, but they're trade unionists, employers and we're trying to get this rounded picture of what, you know, everything that affects people when they try to extend their working lives. And also just to get the employers' perspectives, because we didn't have that. That was kind of a gap that I noticed, you know, would be nice to know what the employers thought, what kind of measures they had or didn't have. So that's what we're working on at the moment and that's pretty exciting because we're going to interview 120 people in each country and looking at their entire work life trajectories. I think this is a really important topic because it's, you know, it's going, it's not going to go away, it's becoming more and more important, and I think this case study approach will be very interesting to see what comes out of that.

Christine Garrington 11:18

Differentiated outcomes at retirement for workers in physically demanding and sedentary work in Ireland, a life course approach, is research presented at the DIAL midterm conference in June 2019. Áine Ní is part of DIAL's DAISIE project, which is funded by NORFACE. You can find out more about the DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for literning to this episode of our dot dynamics crossly.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast which is presented and produced by Chris Carrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

In Episode 7 of the DIAL Podcast, Rachel Robinson from the University of Helsinki discusses her research looking at whether pre-term babies are more likely to be pessimists or optimists and the implications for how they get on as young adults. The research is part of the NORFACE-funded PremLife Project looking at adaptation and life outcomes of preterm and low birth weight children across the lifespan.

Further information:

Rachel Robinson was discussing research presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

Rachel Robinson: Optimist or pessimist? Pre-term personalities and later life chances

Transcript

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're discussing optimism and pessimism in preterm babies, and the implications for their long-term health. Our guest is Rachel Robinson from the University of Helsinki who is part of the DIAL funded project Life Course Dynamics after Preterm Birth -Protective Factors for Social and Educational Transitions, Health and Prosperity.

Rachel Robinson 0:25

Research does show that the more optimistic a person is and the less pessimistic they are the better health outcomes they have, whether that's physical, psychological and social. We have been looking at this, specifically in relation to preterms. A term pregnancy is from the beginning of the 37th week to the end of the 41st week. And so, the most simple way, preterm birth is anything before the 37th week of gestation, of course there's varying degrees of prematurity, with medical technology we have babies surviving much earlier than we did in the past, and the chances of survival have increased so much. In the 1960s 1000 gram infant, which are predominantly very low birth weight infants or preterm would have had a 95% chance of death, where in by the year 2000 that same 1000 gram infant would have a 5% chance of death. So with our great advances in medical technology over the years, we have children surviving who weren't surviving before, and we are now at a point that those children are reaching adulthood. So we see adult life outcomes, which we could never previously see before.

Christine Garrington 1:43

Now you looked at people born preterm in the UK and in Finland. Where did your information come from?

Rachel Robinson 1:48

Our work is part of the Premlife project, and it's a collaboration of several cohorts from around Europe. We use specifically three cohorts, the ALSPAC cohort, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children looking at children born in the 90s from the UK. And then we had two clinical cohorts from Finland, one, which is the Arvo Ylppö longitudinal study where the children were born in the late 80s and then the Helsinki Study of Very Low Birth Weight Children, which were born in the 70s to early 80s. And all of these cohorts had information, starting from the mother's pregnancy, and then extending into early adulthood. So we have quite a few factors and characteristics that we can use to explore.

Christine Garrington 2:36

Now the great thing about these data sets, they are also very large right? And they have a lot of information.

Rachel Robinson 2:43

Yeah, yeah, I mean, for instance the ALSPAC study originally followed over 15,000 children, of course we have less in our analysis just because they didn't all have the outcome that we were looking to study, but the issue in many preterm birth studies is that there's such a limited number of preterm children and each birth cohort that you don't have enough statistical power to really differentiate the effects. And so by combining these cohorts, we have the power to actually see those differences and more nuanced differences, especially over the different gestational ages.

Christine Garrington 3:21

So how did you work out from the information given in those studies, whether people were pessimists or optimists and how optimistic or pessimistic they were compared with their peers? For example.

Rachel Robinson 3:31

So, all of the studies had participants in early adulthood, so around early 20s, take the life orientation test, which looks at some scale of optimism and pessimism and they self-rate whether questions such as, if something bad will happen to me than it will, or you know I always expect good things to happen to me. Questions sort of along those lines, and then they get a score for those.

Christine Garrington 4:00

So Rachel what did you find when you looked at the links between being born preterm and how optimistic someone was?

Rachel Robinson 4:05

So, with optimism, we found great news. Which is that preterm children do not differ in their level of optimism with term born children, which is great and it actually quite aligns well with literature that preterm children rate their quality of life at a similar level as term born children, as well as their life satisfaction, things like that. So, so it makes quite a lot of sense and it's great news that they don't see themselves differently.

Christine Garrington 4:34

And what about the pessimism?

Rachel Robinson 4:36

Pessimism is a bit of a different story. Unfortunately, which is that they do differ in their level of pessimism preterms do have a higher level on their pessimism score, but it's not that simple that it's just preterm makes you more pessimistic. Once we adjusted for other factors, you see that the differences actually go away, and that it's really important to consider maybe other factors that are more concentrated in a preterm population than actually just whether someone is preterm or not.

Christine Garrington 5:11

And that brings me quite nicely into the next question because, of course, you know, some children born preterm might have something like a brain impairment, for example, that might affect their personality I am guessing. Did this have any bearing at all on your findings? Is that one of those things.

Rachel Robinson 5:26

Actually neurosensory impairments, do not have any effect on our findings. When we perform certain sensitivity analysis, which neurosensory impairments include cerebral palsy, hearing, vision, and developmental disability. So, for that group, it didn't actually change the results, but there are factors that do change the result. We see, for instance, that there's a significant impact from your gender, for one, females tend to be more pessimistic than males, but then also there is whether your mother smoked during pregnancy or not, as well as your parental education which we use as a proxy for socio economic status in childhood. And also then an adult BMI, all play a role, and it's important to note that three of those things are all modifiable characteristics.

Christine Garrington 6:22

So what does that actually tell you then?

Rachel Robinson 6:24

It tells us that it's not so much about being preterm, but that more about your level of pessimism is explained by these other factors, and that these other factors for instance maternal smoking is highly predictive of a preterm birth. So you have that much more concentrated in preterm populations, and what it tells us as it affirms literature that smoking has harmful long term effects in pregnancy on the offspring later in life. In regards to the parental education, it tells us that society and government policies which continue to lift up the overall education level of families will improve their societal circumstances and their long term outcomes and also as far as adult BMI goes, continuing to encourage healthy lifestyle behaviours will play a role in people's personalities.

Christine Garrington 7:19

Are there any other key takeaways that you'd like to mention?

Rachel Robinson 7:21

I think it's just quite important that one we recognise that the level of optimism is is equal and that in itself is a very good thing because our research group is looking at what are the factors that allow certain preterm children to prosper. Because there is strong evidence that preterm children have worse outcomes in cognitive impairments, and depression, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, academic achievement and physical health factors, higher blood pressure, there's so many factors that we see later in life which are negatively affected, and it's really refreshing to see that there is, in certain ways, no difference. So that's quite good and, but then, many of the factors that we see, explain the difference between preterms and terms are something that are modifiable.

Christine Garrington 8:16

Yeah, so there are small changes potentially that could make big, long term differences for these for these for these babies. So early work, obviously, showing some really important findings, really interesting findings where things go from here in the project? And what more are you hoping to be able to do?

Rachel Robinson 8:36

Our project will continue to pursue other outcomes there we'll be looking at how we can find ways to encourage societal government and family policies to really support pre terms now, and in future, and improve their lives and so that's that's the general direction that our work will continue to go and there are many universities and institutions around Europe collaborating to bring their data on preterm birth together and really join forces to find what makes life better. And also I was preterm myself that it has its own level of importance to me and also I think it's a topic that impacts a lot of people because people think that when you're a small child, or the small infant, then you catch up, that they don't suffer as much as far as social, academic, relational, all of these outcomes that we see now being different, as a preterm child I had no idea that I was at higher risk for for these things later in life. So, at least to me, it's fascinating.

Christine Garrington 9:46

Optimism and Pessimism and Preterm is research presented at the DIAL Conference 2019 by Rachel Robinson. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

In Episode 6 of the DIAL podcast, Christian Zünd from the University of Zurich discusses his research looking at the interplay between our genes and what we drink, local availability of alcohol and the role of licensing laws. The research is part of the NORFACE-funded project, Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities (GEIGHEI), which is looking at how Genes and the Environment (GxE) interact to generate inequalities in education and health over the life course.

Further information:

Christian Zünd was discussing research presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

Transcript

In Episode 6 of the DIAL podcast, Christian Zünd from the University of Zurich discusses his research looking at the interplay between our genes and what we drink, local availability of alcohol and the role of licensing laws. The research is part of the NORFACE-funded project, Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities (GEIGHEI), which is looking at how Genes and the Environment (GxE) interact to generate inequalities in education and health over the life course.

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode we're discussing genes, pubs and drinks and asking what our genes can tell us about our alcohol consumption? How they interact with our environment? And what all that might mean for public health policy? Our guest is Christian Zünd from the University of Zurich, he's part of the DIAL funded project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities.

Christian Zünd 0:28

Basically there's about 60 different medical conditions that have been strongly associated with alcohol consumption, there's a lot of sort of epidemiological and medical literature that looks at these current links. There's even been a paper that tries to sort of quantify the impact of alcohol consumption, sort of, compared to say smoking or obesity and these kind of things added to inside that it's actually on a global scale sort of comparable to the damage caused by smoking, or by hypertension and these kind of thing so it's quite a major health issue.

Christine Garrington 1:00

So when it comes to any links that might exist between our genes, which is what we're here to talk about today, and the alcohol we drink, what was it that you wanted to look at specifically and why?

Christian Zünd 1:12

Part of it is that we're really interested in seeing how different components sort of come together to determine how much you drink, and so part of that is your genetic makeup. So there are certain factors that influence how likely you are to drink, basically by influencing the way your body deals with different kinds of sugars and so that's at least part of the story. And the other part seems to be just a residue of all sorts of behavioural factors that might make you more likely to go to frequent pubs and these kind of things so it's not entirely clear what's going on there but we have some idea. Part of it is a metabolism, breaking down different sugars kind of story and the other policy is not that well understood at the moment, then the other factor is just your local environment so we all know that if you are a student you tend to drink more. So there's this kind of age, lifecycle aspects to it. And there's also the factor, which is basically just how easy it is for you to go to a place and have a beer there. And so what we decided to study is basically looking at how your genetic makeup interacts with your local environment, and we'll look specifically at how many hops are there within one kilometre of the place of your residence, and we also look a bit at supermarkets and these kind of things

Christine Garrington 2:25

And where did you get your information from?

Christian Zünd 2:28

Where? Yeah so it's becoming increasingly easy to do this kind of genetic research. And one big factor is the UK has this really amazing data source called the UK Biobank, and it's about half a million individuals, and we do have genetic information for them and a lot of other health related behaviours. So there's a number of questions that deal with how frequently do you drink alcohol? Very specific questions about how much beer do you drink? How much wine you drink? Sparkling wine with these kind of things, so there's quite quite a lot of rich information on health behaviours and we also know where these people live so basically what we were able to do is sort of match this information from the UK Biobank with a large cross section of where all the pubs in the UK are located, and we've we've had over, 10 or so largest supermarket chains, the UK and so we have a pretty good idea of how easy it is for these people to buy alcohol somewhere.

Christine Garrington 3:20

So, how did you make use of the genetic information that was available then. So what have you done with it, basically, um, what can it tell you what does it tell you about people's drinking habits?

Christian Zünd 3:30

The approach we use is called a polygenic risk score, and the idea is that instead of trying to identify the one gene that causes you to drink a lot if you just take sort of like bird's eye view of the entire genome and you look at all the different associations and even though each one of them contributes very little to your drinking behaviour, combined, if you look at all of them you can actually tell quite a lot about how much people drink. And so it's this useful approach for all sorts of complex traits where it's not entirely clear which genes are involved in it or whether it is a large combination of them, people have been using it to look at the educational attainment, people have been using it for height and BMI, these kind of things. We use this for alcoholic consumption,

Christine Garrington 4:16

And so what about how you are able, if you were able to establish the availability of alcohol in an individual's local area? For example, and also how did you sort of find out whether there were any local efforts, if you like - any policies in place to try to restrict the amount of alcohol, the people were consuming? as I mentioned we

Christian Zünd 4:34

As I mentioned we have information basic data from the internet on the locations of pretty much every single pub in UK, and we do have their coordinates from Google Maps and that allows us to then match them fairly precisely with the place with someone on our lists, and initially what we wanted to do is we wanted to look at like, what's the shortest distance to a pub that you have so how far will you have to walk to get to a pub? But because that measure is only precise to some degree. It turned out that actually a lot of the people in our sample live very close to pub so we didn't really have a lot of variation there so instead we decided to look at how many pubs, do you have within one kilometre? and there we find quite a bit of variation so if you're living in a more rural place, it's actually possibility do not have a single pub within one kilometre, although that tends to be very rare in our data. And if you live in a place like Blackpool, you probably going to have two or 300 pubs or restaurants and these kind of things within one kilometre of your residence, so there's a lot of variation there.

Christine Garrington 5:39

Okay, so let's start getting into the nitty gritty of what you found so far, appreciate it is probably ongoing, but you have found some things already, just talk us through some of the main things that you found around that.

Christian Zünd 5:52

The first one is not entirely surprising, which is that we're actually able to predict quite a bit of how much people drink. So the people who sort of score lowest on the polygenic risk score they drink about half as much on average as the people who score highest so there's a fairly strong relationship there, the more interesting finding is that if you have a high genetic propensity to drink a lot, you react much less to sort of changes in the environment. So, it seems that if you're not very prone to drink, and you would have to walk quite a bit to get a pub, or there's not that many options, you might just drink whereas if you have a high genetic propensity walking a bit doesn't really seem to deter you. So there's sort of this difference in how much you react to these availabilities in the environment. Then there's a second finding, which is quite interesting, which seems to be that people who have a high genetic risk to drink tend to self-select into places where there's more opportunity to go drinking. And so we tried a number of different approaches and they're basically supplying the same result. So one is just to look at the cross section, then see whether we can predict the number of pubs, based on your polygenic score. And that seems to be the case. The other one looks at people that we can observe at several different points in time. And there it turns out that if you have a high genetic propensity to drink, but you live in a place with few pubs you are more likely to move to a new place, same is true if you have a very low polygenic risk to drink, and you live in a place with a lot of pubs, also more likely to move to new place. And the third thing is that if you compare where someone grew up, and how many pubs there were around that place to where they live now. You do find the people with a high polygenic score, tend to have to move to places have more pubs and people with lower score tend to move to places with fewer pubs. So there seems to be quite a lot of sort of self-selection in the environment there.

Christine Garrington 7:55

But what about only sort of the policy from then? Because efforts are made in certain areas, whether it's to stop more drinking outlets or more pubs opening up, or restricting the amount of hours for example that pubs and places where you can buy alcohol, stay open. Where's the link there then with sort of local policies that are in place? What do we learn?

Christian Zünd 8:20

Alcohol licencing policy tends to be fairly decentralised for UK standards. And so there's quite a bit of variation in how likely these places are to try to restrict drinking. But the interesting thing from our perspective is that they're actually not allowed to make public health considerations in their decision making but only to look at things like public noise and disturbances, the impact that it might have on children, and these kind of things but they're not supposed to try to use this as a public health tool and so in a way we have this variation that's introduced for other reasons that we can try to see how that affects health behaviours, so far is mostly concentrated on the tool called a no sales licence, so there's a lot of different establishments that could apply for licences to sell alcohol so there's not only pubs and restaurants but there's also basically every kind of entertainment area that's open late so that includes sports facilities, it includes theatres and cinemas and batting halls and all these kind of establishments. Some places, tend to hand out no sales licences so even though they're licenced to stay open and provide entertainment and these kind of things they're not allowed to sell alcohol. There's a lot of variation in how likely these local licencing boards are to restrict sales and all of these other places. And what we find there is quite interesting because it's basically just saying that we found, for the different reaction to how easy it is to walk to pubs. So we also find that the people with the highest polygenic risk to drink react to least to these changes, whereas the people with the low polygenic risk, they tend to be the people that actually start to drink less if it's harder for them to go drinking, and then we looked at a number of other tools such as licences that allow you to sell alcohol 24/7, and we would expect to have an effect that goes in the other direction. That seems to be a case so if there's more outlets that are likely to sell alcohol basically all night long. People in this area tend to drink more. And we can see that, sort of, the change is strongest for the people that have the lowest risk score and the people with the highest genetic risk to drink they basically don't change their consumption as much. Which has a number of interesting implications in the sense that if these are the people that we actually want to target, and to have an impact on their behaviour. These tools don't really seem to be effective for that.

Christine Garrington 10:52

Yeah, that's brings us nicely to my next question really which is sort of what do we learn about how useful genetic information is in efforts to create and maybe evaluate public health policies?

Christian Zünd 11:02

The question is obviously that we learn anything more from incorporating this genetic information from what we could get it if we just ask people do they drink a lot or not? And we tried to test this and it's, interestingly enough, you can even if you control for how much people drink, you can still use their genetic information to predict a lot about the risks of developing what, some of these associated diseases so a disease of the liver of the digestive system, these kind of things. Which seems to imply that either there's some other genetic channel, or more likely that the genetic information is actually in a sense a more comprehensive measure of their lifetime alcohol exposure and what you would get if you just ask them how much they drank in the last week or something like this. So there seems to be this, just sort of it being a valuable measure to predict these kind of medical conditions. And the other thing is that it gets at a kind of underlying inequality that is otherwise not observable. If we think about your genetic environment is sort of being inequality that's fixed the conception, where you can differ from your siblings for example for for some reason that sort of completely outside of your control. We can then see whether these policy interventions, mitigate these inequalities and sort of protect you against them or whether they actually lead to stronger inequality in the amount of alcohol that they actually consume. And it turns out that, at least for the policies we looked at they tend to actually increase inequality because the people that we would like to react most tend to be the people who react least these kind of policy interventions.

Christine Garrington 12:45

So, just finally, what would you say the takeaway message and then from those really interested in the public health in public health policies and to reduce the burden on overstretched health services, particularly in places like the UK but indeed elsewhere?

Christian Zünd 12:58

It's an open question so it could be done on other other kind of policies are actually able to protect against this sort of genetic inequality. So one thing that we would really like to study but unfortunately can't in the UK, are changes in the age we're allowed to drink. And so if our current data we can't really look at this but in theory could be that if you've raised the age that people are allowed to drink, you will actually find a policy that mitigates against this inequality instead of sort of increasing it in the end, but that's an open question.

Christine Garrington 13:30

Genes, pubs and drinks is research presented at the DIAL conference 2019 by Christian Zünd. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

In Episode 5 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Karl Ulrich Mayer of Yale University and the Max Planck Institute of Human Development discusses life course research, longitudinal studies and how they can help develop develop effective social policy. He also discusses what he calls his "just one wish data set" and why he believes we are close to having a Lifecourse Observatory.

Karl Ulrich is a keynote speaker at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference 2019.

Useful links

• An Observatory for Life Courses: Populations, Countries, Institutions, and History
• Societal Change and Educational Trajectories of Women and Men Born between 1919 and 1986 in (West) Germany

In Episode 4 of the DIAL Podcast, Dr Jo Blanden from the University of Surrey talks about her research using the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to look at home ownership and earnings for younger people and how the picture compares with that of their parents.

Jo is a keynote speaker at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference 2019.

Jo Blanden: How well are youngsters getting on compared with mum and dad?

In Episode 4 of the DIAL Podcast, Dr Jo Blanden from the University of Surrey talks about her research using the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to look at home ownership and earnings for younger people and how the picture compares with that of their parents.

Jo is a keynote speaker at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference 2019.

Transcript

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're discussing intergenerational mobility, and asking how the younger generations fare and compared to their parents when it comes to owning a home and what they earn. Our guest is Dr. Jo Blanden, from the University of Surrey, who is using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to look at these questions and also to see if the picture is different in the UK from elsewhere.

Jo Blanden 0:28

Intergenerational mobility is the relationship between the social and economic status of parents and children. And generally, we think of this in two ways. And most of my research has looked at relative mobility, which kind of thinks of, you know, success as a kind of ladder, and looks at what run your own compared to what run your parents are on and kind of keeps the ladders next to each other. So it's a relative, it's a relative measure. And it's often seen as a measure of the openness of society, and sort of a kind of idea about equality of opportunity. And it's not without its difficulties, but that's something that's commonly been looked at. Alternatively, we can consider absolute mobility. If you look at your parents' life and your life, you can say, well, I've made progress compared to them. And that says everybody can make progress. It's an absolute measure, not a relative one.

Christine Garrington 1:16

What specific aspects of intergenerational mobility have you been looking at and why?

Jo Blanden 1:22

Economists have often thought about this, and I am an economist, in terms of the economic wellbeing of generations by looking at relative income and earnings mobility. You know, a number of years ago, colleagues, and I looked at relative mobility in the UK, for people born in 1958 and people born in 1970. And what we found there is that there seemed to be a decline in relative mobility. In other words, you're more tied to where your parents were, then in the 1970 cohort that had been the case in the 1958 cohort. And then I think the evidence suggests that things kind of levelled out. So they got worse, there was less intergenerational mobility, and then that's kind of remained fairly static. And we also found around that time that the UK seems to be fairly immobile compared to other developed countries. Now, where the gap is, there's been much less said about intergenerational wealth correlations, or this measure of absolute mobility. And both of these are clearly really important dimensions of how lay people and politicians conceptualise economic mobility. You know, a lot of people will think of mobility in terms of having wealth, because you kind of have this idea of a landed gentry having a lot of wealth and that being inherited across generations. So that is clearly an important aspect of what people think about as wealth. And it's also true that when people think of mobility, they really are comparing themselves to the absolute living standards of their own parents. So that's the absolute dimension that I'm going to consider as well.

Christine Garrington 2:47

Right. So one main focus of some of your most recent work has been home ownership. And what can looking at who owns a home and who doesn't, within and across generations tell us?

Jo Blanden 2:58

In my work with Steve Machin and Andy Eals we argue about homeownership is an important driver of and proxy for wealth. And we estimate intergenerational correlations in homeownership across different countries and time periods. So we focus on the UK but we look at other countries for comparison. And that kind of makes sense, because housing equity is the largest component of overall wealth in a number of countries. And also inequality in home ownership is one of the important drivers of wealth inequality. So one of the reasons why we're worried about and indeed, we think about the fact that young people are finding it hard to own their own home because of the impact on their that's going to have on their ability to accumulate wealth. You might argue that intergenerational transmissions of wealth is kind of even more important to understand than correlations in income, which we've looked at more, because wealth is so important in people's permanent consumption and their ability to kind of withstand shocks and plan for the future. So it seems really important to build wealth. But sometimes we can't look at wealth directly, because we just don't have very good data on that. So homeownership seems kind of a sensible proxy and that's the argument we are building.

Christine Garrington 4:04

Indeed, and on that note, there's been a lot of discussion here in the UK and elsewhere about how hard younger people are finding it to get on the housing ladder. This is something that you wanted to look at, specifically, what exactly did you do?

Jo Blanden 4:16

There's a couple of things we did. The first thing we did, as you discussed, is to actually lay out the facts of what young people's experience of homeownership has been over time. And we find something really striking there. For the youngest group that we look at under 35-year-olds, there's been a really steep decline in home ownership rates. So in about 19, in 1996 50% of this group owned their own homes, and it's now down to about 30%. And there have been similar smaller declines of people in older groups. Although, interestingly over 65 years and actually increase the rate of owner occupancy. There is a real cohort effect there because that group would have been the ones that were able to take advantage of buying a home say in the 80s where it was a bit more affordable, right to buy etc. So that's one thing that we looked at was to kind of lay out those trends in homeownership among young people. The other thing we do is to look at this relationship between homeownership parents, and homeownership children. And what we find there is there is an important correlation there, so that if your parents own their own home, you're more likely to own your own home. It is a strong affect and it also seems to have gotten worse. So that when we're looking at these falls in owner occupancy, among younger groups, they've been much larger among people who parents didn't own their own homes so there's real inequality there.

Christine Garrington 5:33

And I'm interested to know where you got your information from Joe.

Jo Blanden 5:36

The Labour Force survey takes regular measures of who are owner occupiers. So we can use that to kind of look at the general trends. But the most important data we have used is what social scientist call longitudinal data, where you can come back and look at people over many years. So we can use the British Household Panel, which asked people every year questions about wealth, and homeownership, etc. But we can also use these British Cohort Studies, which have followed a group of babies all the way from birth, every few years, all the way up to adulthood. In fact, the National cohort, National Child Development Study, people born in 1958, now reached their 60th year, and I went to their 60th birthday conference last year, which was really interesting. So those dates are really, really valuable to this kind of study

Christine Garrington 6:22

How do what you can what you found in the UK compare with the other countries that you looked at? Because indeed, you did look at other countries.

Jo Blanden 6:32

Yes. And it's really interesting, because the trends that we see in the declining owner occupancy among younger people in the UK, completely dwarfed those seen in the other countries that we look at. So we consider this in Germany, the US, in Australia over the same period. And while we do see slight declines, it's nothing like what we see in the UK. And that's interesting, because in Australia house price changes have been nearly as great as the UK, it's been really big rises in house prices in Australia as well. But nonetheless, the UK has the largest rise in house prices, and the biggest shift against owner occupancy for people. And when we look at this idea of this question across generations, so whether parents and children have a correlation with owner occupancy, we see that we do see this in all the countries that we consider, but it's stronger in the UK than in these other three countries. So young people whose parents own their own home are 25 to 30% more likely to own their own home in Australia, Germany and the US. And it's really consistent across those countries, where in the UK, it's about 40% more likely. When we look at the British Household panel it is really striking. And the next thing you want to do in this research is really think about how we can link this up to this idea that we've got in our heads about the link between this and the intergenerational correlation of wealth. And to also understand how the UK housing market which is quite different from those in other countries might be bringing that these changes as well. So we've got a little bit more work to do.

Christine Garrington 8:00

Yeah, indeed, it'll be interesting to think about this in the context of Brexit, I'm sure, going forward. Now, the second aspect of your work, you've mentioned already in this area is what you described as absolute mobility or what's referred to as absolute mobility, I wonder if you can just for those people, that might not be quite sure what that is, explain what it is, and why you think it is such an important consideration.

Jo Blanden 8:22

So we've already kind of touched on this in terms of the owner occupancy thing, you know, if your parents own a home, to be absolutely mobile, you would want to own a home as well. Or if your parents didn't own a home to be absolutely mobile, you would then move on own one. So when we think about this more generally, kind of thinking of the idea of being better off than your parents. And that's what we mean by absolute mobility. So despite this being the first thing that many people think of when they're asked to consider, you know, ideas of intergenerational mobility, we don't know that much about it. Firstly, because historically, it's not been an issue, because earnings growth has always been strong. So you can kind of guarantee that you're going to do better earn more than your parents in absolute terms, when you take it out in the effective prices. So nobody really worried about this very much. It was much more frequently discussed in the sociological literature, because there was this idea of people moving from a working-class background to a white collar jobs. And that was seen as absolute mobility in Sociology, whereas in economics, people didn't really worry about it. Also, and this is kind of similar to the wealth story is a particularly good data, which gives you a really precise measure of income, which is comparable to a really precise measure of income of your parents. So it's actually quite hard to measure. But we've used some methodological tricks to overcome that and actually consider that in the UK.

Christine Garrington 9:43

On that note, that's going to be my next question. You've been looking at it in the UK, as you said, what have you found?

Jo Blanden 9:48

So we have had to use some methodological tricks here to think about where you are in your own earnings distribution, the earnings distribution of parents, the earnings distribution of children, and how those two match up. So we actually use a number of different data sources to bring this story together. But that doesn't matter so much. The important thing is that we look at where the young people in their 30s, earned more than their parents did, at a comparable age. And what we find there is that this idea of absolute mobility had been rising. So each generation had a higher possibility of doing better than their parents in the previous one. And that went up to the mid 1970s, about my cohort. But then it's really fallen, it's absolutely tanked. So for kids born in 1975, who were 30, in 2005, half of them out earned their parents at the same age. Okay? But in the decades since, there's been a really steep decline. So now only about a third of children who were born in 1987. In other words, who were 30 in 2007 will match or exceed their parents' earnings. And actually, it's interesting, because what seems to be really important here is the time that you measure the earnings. It's not to do with which cohort your born in so much as when we observe your earnings. So the key thing there is the people who do well in terms of absolute mobility were those who were 30 before the recession, and after the recession it has tanked. And it is the same for 40 year olds. If we observe their earnings before the recession, they were doing really well. But after the recession, they've tanked not quite as bad for them as the 30 year olds. But there's still a really strong story that recessions got a lot to do with this.

Christine Garrington 11:32

Really important finding. So what would you say then this body of work tells us about how younger generations, I've got a daughter in her 20s. So I'm keen to know and I know she's keen to know, how they're faring compared with me, their parents, it would seem to paint, unfortunately, rather a bleak picture, especially here in the UK, which is, which is something that you've clearly found.

Jo Blanden 11:55

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And kind of preparing for our chat today, I was trying to think of something positive to say, and it's not that easy. So when you look around, see what think tanks says the resolution Foundation, I've got to say about this, they proposed things like a universal inheritance. So everybody will get £10,000 when they are, you know, I guess the 21 or 25. And that might help kind of even things out, they also talk a lot about helping young people get on to good career paths, which I think is really important. And actually I kind of chuckle at my students sometimes, because they seem to be so career focused at such a young age. But actually, maybe it's just different now. And maybe that's kind of how you how you need to be unfortunately, so any kind of government policy that can kind of smooth out and help young people get on the career ladder, I think, does seem to be quite useful. But it's definitely not an easy, not an easy question at all. And I think, partly because what we're seeing is we're seeing an overall decline in earnings, which is really hitting young people very hard. Before the recession, real earnings were growing by about 2% each year. Okay. Now, if that growth had carried on after 2007 and Brexit had hit, we wouldn't have a problem. In terms of absolute mobility, it would have stayed constant. So it really is all about earnings. And that raises some big macro and micro economic questions as to how we can really improve those young people.

Christine Garrington 13:25

From your perspective, Jo, I wonder if you think there are any particular sort of key takeaway points for policymakers who would keep telling us that they want you to generations to fare better than the earlier ones?

Jo Blanden 13:36

So the UK has been in this kind of productivity puzzle ever since the Great Recession. And economists have spent quite a lot of time thinking about this. So has this problem come about because we're not innovating enough? Because maybe we have run out of ideas? Is it because actually we are innovating, but it's just in ways that are really hard to measure, so we can't capture the kind of value added of technology etc. So that's one possibility. The other the other possibility is that actually, a lot of this is caused by the austerity before the Great Recession. And actually, you know, we need to kind of ease up a little bit for demand to actually be created so that output can rise. So that's one side of the story is this productivity, productivity puzzle, and I think that's essential for young people. And the other side of it, of course, is prices. The way that we look at this is whether earnings are actually growing faster than prices. Well, the recent events with Brexit have actually led to quite a strong price rise with the fall in the pound. And so that's not going to help young people if that continues or worsens. There are some really kind of quite important big economic stories here that government needs to address. And it's not particularly clear how they can how they can do that. But of course, the current kind of political nonsense that we're in does make it really hard in the UK at least to focus on any of these big issues.

Christine Garrington 14:55

Jo Blanden is one of the keynote speakers at the Dynamics of Inequality Across the Lifecourse midterm in June 2019. More information is available on the DIAL website at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Jo Blanden from the University of Surrey talks about her research looking at home ownership and earnings for younger generations and how the picture compares with that of their parents.

In Episode 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Florencia Torche from Stanford University talks about the impact of acute stress on a child's outcomes even if the stress occurs before they are born.

Florencia is a keynote speaker at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference 2019.

Transcript

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're asking whether and how acute stress might affect the lives of children, even if it's experienced in the months before they're born. I'm joined by Professor Florencia Torche from Stanford University who has been looking at links between environmental stressors and children's outcomes, and how these exposures contribute to the persistence of poverty across generations.

Florence Torche 0:28

It is the case that children that who grew up in poverty are much more likely than our children to be exposed to a wide range of environmental stressors and toxins. This includes natural disasters and violence in you know, your neighbourhood or the wider context. It includes lead toxicity, neighbourhood conflict, and so on. Now, we know that all these exposures that children are affected to are bad for them have a handful effects on their health, on their education, on their development. Because of that, these exposures are more likely to result in disadvantage in later life, and therefore inequality. That provides a link for early exposures as early as before birth, and then poverty in later life, and the reproduction of poverty across generations, because the poor kids are much more likely to be affected by these environmental exposures.

Christine Garrington 1:40

So that's the background, what aspects of children's lives have you focused on specifically and why?

Florence Torche 1:45

My research has specifically focused on prenatal exposures, exposures that happened even before birth, and then whether or not and to what extent those prenatal exposures affects children's health, as early as when they're born. So measure, for example, through birth weight, gestational age, and then there are those children's health as they grow up and enter into adolescence, their cognitive development and their education. These outcomes are crucial research indicates very clearly for their wellbeing as adults, right for whether they're going to have a comfortable life? Whether they're going to have a sufficient level of economic wellbeing? So if we're able to understand how they develop early in life, we will have a very good, very precise indicator of how well they will fare in adulthood. This is all embedded in a, what we call a lifecourse perspective. Basically, you want to understand what happened to people very early in their lifecourses, in order to be able to better understand and predict what will happen to them as they age, as they grow up and become adults

Christine Garrington 3:07

Understood. So you've undertaken some work in the last few years, looking at the impact of an acutely stressful event. In this case, what we're talking about is an earthquake has happened in Chile, on outcomes for children whose mothers had experienced the earthquake while they were pregnant. What was your thinking behind this research?

Florence Torche 3:27

Researchers have claimed one important reason why poverty so bad for children is that it causes stress and stress disrupt development early in life. Well, that claim is very reasonable. It's certainly possible, but it hasn't been proven. So I thought, how can I prove that it is stress, and not other correlates or consequences of poverty, that is really bad children? Of course, stress is correlated with many bad things that happen to people, right. So what my task was as a researcher was to find some source of stress that was uncorrelated with other, you know, harmful exposures, what I was searching for was a so called natural experiment. So a setting in which stress happens at random, and that I found with an earthquake, we with current technology, we don't know when and where an earthquake will occur in this country. In that case, an earthquake provide something very close to an experimental design in the sense that women who had the bad fortune of being exposed to a particular earthquake are randomly allocated to an earthquake acid were right because they are no different from women living in some other region of the country, where the earth quake did not happen. And then what I did was to examine what happened with the babies who were born to the women who happen to be exposed to the earthquake and compare that to other women who were pregnant in the same country at the same time, but in a region that was not exposed to the earthquake, and I that provided my so called control group.

Christine Garrington 5:24

So in this instance, we were looking to see if there might be some link between pregnant mums who experienced an earthquake and the weight that their baby was born. So before you tell us what you found there, can you just explain why a baby's birth weight is an important measurement or indicator to consider when we think about how they might get on later on in life?

Florence Torche 5:40

And also another important birth outcome present is a gestational age. In particular, whether the baby was born low weight - that's below 2500 grams - and whether the baby was born preterm – that is before 30 weeks of gestation. The reason to choose these outcomes is that they provide the very first measure that we researchers can observe of the baby's health and wellbeing. And based on recent research, we know now, these birth outcomes, they predict infant mortality and morbidity. And furthermore, they predict childhood in development, cognitive and social emotional development, they predict educational attainment, and they even predict outcomes in adulthood, they predict earnings, they predict income, they predict your ability to marry and form a family. They predict a wide range of outcomes throughout the entire lifecourse. So they provide a very powerful indicator of, you know, opportunities and endowments of individuals at the starting gate of life. I do not mean that someone who is for low weight is doomed to having problems at all, but they increase the likelihood of having developmental or educational, and even economic limitations in quite substantial proportion. So they provide at the population level, a very good indication of a certain limitation that we may want to prepare for and we may want to take into account.

Christine Garrington 7:30

Right, so let's move on to the important stuff, what you found and what you think we learned from what you found?

Florence Torche 7:36

The women who had the bad fortune of being exposed to these sorts of acute stress, the earthquake had babies that were on average, of lower birth weight, and they were substantially more likely to be born low weight and to be born preterm. So when I compare the women who experienced the earthquake, and the women who did not experience the earthquake, but gave birth at the same time, there was a substantial difference in the proportion of low weight babies and preterm babies. These harmful effect of the exposure to the earthquake was very clearly concentrated on the first trimester of gestation. Only for those women exposed early in the pregnancy, we found such a harmful effect on birth outcomes. This research provides strong evidence that exposure to acute stress is bad for a infant health. And given that we know that infant health is predictive of development and wellbeing later on in life, prenatal exposure to acute stress may have harmful effects throughout those babies lifecourses. What my research suggests is that exposure to acute stress, even if short term might be bad for children, if it happens before birth.

Christine Garrington 9:08

In a follow up paper, you looked at the longer-term effects on children's cognitive abilities tell us what you did there.

Florence Torche 9:15

There isn't that we just discussed finds a negative effect of stress on birth outcomes. And like I said, birth outcomes predict later disadvantage. But, of course, we want to know if it is indeed the case that prenatal stress has accumulated effect on children as they grow up and they develop? So in order to address this question, I did this a follow up research in which I still use the earthquake. And I follow up kids over time, and I measure their cognitive development when they were about seven years of age. And what I found there was that exposure to the stress so in utero, so prenatally had a significant negative effect on kids' cognitive development. But importantly, this effect manifested itself only among poor children, there was no effect among the middle-class children. So it was an effect that was stratified by socio economic advantage. And that emerged only among families that were in poverty.

Christine Garrington 10:28

So in another area of your work also, in a similar sort of way, has focused on these stressful situations that migrants find themselves in the US, particularly in recent times where some states have introduced new and what some might describe as extremely restrictive laws aimed at curbing migration. Now, tell us what you were looking at there and why you moved on to this topic.

Florence Torche 10:52

I see this research on the effect of a prenatal exposure to these restrictive immigration laws as part of the same research agenda, which is to really try to understand whether these sources of environmental stress experienced before birth matter to people. Sitting here, as you mentioned, is very different. Now, I'm looking at one particular a very restrictive immigration law that was passed in the state of Arizona, in the United States. This law was passed in 2010, the law implemented a series of restrictions, attempting to make life so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they would, quote unquote, self deport that they would leave basically, that was the stated objective of the law. And my interest was to try to understand whether the passage of this law affected the health of babies of immigrants, but not only of undocumented immigrants, but also of the entire immigrant population, including documented immigrants, and even perhaps the Hispanic population in the United States. In that particular state that wasn't immigrant that was US born, that it may have failed, or be seen as very close to the immigrant population. This research was based on the birth records for Arizona, and four other states that are used as control states by, in this attempt to try to isolate the effect of stress for the babies that were in utero. During the passage of this law, there was a detrimental effect on birth outcomes, again, only for the babies of immigrant women in Arizona. I compare these effects with pregnancies of a US born black and white women, and there was no effect. So in fact, I was able to document an effect, a negative effect on the immigrant population.

Christine Garrington 13:12

One very surprising finding from your research in this area was that babies whose mothers have been exposed to violence, obviously another form of acute stress, and in this case, Homicide in Mexico, were heavier on average than those who were not. And these experiences reduced the overall proportion of babies with a low birth weight. What do you make of that? Because it seems rather counterintuitive, especially after all this other evidence that you've, that you've, you've put together.

Florence Torche 13:43

What happened in Mexico, during a period after the year 2000 is that there was an enormous increase of drug trafficking related violence. So my question was, is the increase in violence affecting the health of infants that are born in Mexico? And to my surprise, mothers exposed to local violence were likely to give birth to babies that were heavier on average, and less likely to be low weight. We did the research several times to just make sure that this finding was indeed a true finding. And once we convinced ourselves, we find we search for explanations. Those mothers that were exposed to violence in their municipality, were much more likely to seek prenatal care. It was the benefits of prenatal care that were able to more than compensate for any negative effect of violent exposure. Specifically, those moms who were exposed to violence started prenatal care areas and went to the doctor more often. It really captures the agency of women, in this case pregnant women, right. We just documented one mechanism that we may use to protect their pregnancy. Secondly, we found this effect only among poor women living in urban areas. And the reason is clear to see once you think about it, first of all, among more advantaged women, they were all using prenatal care. So there was less room for they increase use, right. So it was the poor women who, prior to exposure to violence, were may have not gone to the doctor early in their pregnancies who decided to do so. But only in urban settings, because in the Mexican case, in rural settings, they access to health care, and in this case, to prenatal care, it's very limited. So even if they wanted to go It was much more difficult to them, we may not be able to reduce substantially the exposure to stress, I mean, stress has happened in people's lives. And it may they may continue to happen even if we try to reduce them and even if we're successful person, but even so, if we are able to provide easy access, quick access to prenatal care of high quality, we may be able to at least counteract to some extent the noxious effects of a stress exposure.

Christine Garrington 16:39

I just before we sort of really wrap up and talk about the broader policy implications of your research, I want to ask you about one more bit of research that you did, where you looked at, where mothers have been caught up in a war situation. And once again, looked at the impact of that or the ramifications of that to the birth weight of their children. Tell us what you found there.

Florence Torche 17:00

This research was conducted in in Israel in the northern part of Israel, in context of a of an armed conflict in which people who are living in northern Israel were vulnerable to missiles coming from across the border. So the babies born in that area after the war, were more likely to be low weight and preterm than babies born before or after, or in other regions of the country, suggesting once more that it is the exposure to acute stress that caused this decline. In in both a birth weight and gestational age, the actual damage of the missiles was extremely limited. In fact, virtually no missile landed in the area. So this provides clear indication that it was stress and not the actual consequence of the missile that produced the damage.

Christine Garrington 18:03

Florencia this is an important and fascinating body of work that you've done, what would you say, as a whole, it tells us about how this acute stress is acutely stressful events, impact on children's lives and also for what it means for how they will fare later on in life compared with those children who've had more of a stress free path into life. And certainly through the first few months and years of their life. What have we learned?

Florence Torche 18:30

We have now very persuasive evidence that stress experienced before birth has long term consequences we have clearly documented an affect in birth outcomes. And now my recent research documented an effect on cognitive ability and then subsequent educational attainment. Those early outcomes are so predictive, predictive of economic wellbeing later in life that we have a unfortunately, quite clear evidence that the children who have the bad fortune of being exposed of stressors before birth, may have trajectories that are more disadvantage than their peers. That they're they they're more likely to have developed health, developmental, and socio-economic limitations later in life. These to me highlights the relevance of including the prenatal period when we consider population health. The prenatal period is very easily neglected and forgotten. Because it's invisible. Unless we search for exposures before birth, we're not going to find them, but they're going to be consequential for the health and wellbeing of the next generation. So, in my view, my research and that of others, really highlights the importance of looking for these potentially harmful exposures that may happen even before birth, and to try to implement to the extent that is possible with policy strategies to try to compensate for the disadvantages that these exposures cause. It's not that we're gonna create a stress-free world, but we can certainly develop policies to try to compensate for the harmful effects of stress that are experienced even the solvency of

Christine Garrington 20:27

Florencia Torche is one of the keynote speakers at the Dynamics of Inequality Across the Lifecourse midterm conference in June 2019. More information is available on the DIAL website at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.