Dear RSF:

Please join us on Wednesday, May 4th for Visiting Scholar John Bound’s presentation, “Economic distress and growing educational disparities in life expectancy: Weathering, high effort coping, and despair.”

Bound is the George E. Johnson Collegiate Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, and an active member of the governing faculty of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, as well as a Faculty Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Much of Bound’s research centers on the effect of health on the labor force behavior of older working-aged men and women with a focus on the effects of the U.S. Social Security Disability Program on the behavior and economic well-being of working aged individuals. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard.

At RSF, Bound and Arline Geronimus are examining how stagnating economic prospects among moderate-income households’ impact increasing inequities in life expectancy. Their research is testing the weathering hypothesis, which indicates that structurally rooted stress causes wear and tear on cellular integrity and thus accelerates biological aging, hastens the onset of chronic diseases, increases the incidence of disability, and causes excess death in affected individuals and communities. They are also analyzing competing hypotheses for explaining increased inequity in life expectancy.