F Torche
Biographic Data
| ID | 13606 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F Torche |
| GIVEN NAMES | F |
| FAMILY NAME | Torche |
| SIGNATURE | TORCHE F |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2801-9227 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1253 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Changing Opportunity
Bright but Poor
Undermatching identifies high school graduates who do not attend selective colleges even if they have high academic performance. To date, the study of undermatching is restricted to access to selective colleges and to the United States and the United Kingdom. We expand this concept to identify students who, having high academic performance, do not undertake five critical educational transitions: graduating from high school, enrolling in higher ed…
Still the Father's Name? Normative Change and Continuity in Children's Surnames
Effects of the President’s Party on Infant Health Across Racial & Ethnic Groups in the United States
This visualization extends previous research reporting a positive effect of prenatal exposure of Democratic presidencies on the health outcomes of Black and White infants in the United States between 1971 and 2018. Using detailed information on race and ethnicity and new data for 2019 to 2024, the authors disaggregate birth outcome rates for Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian babies during a 36-year period between 1989 and 2024. They address three…
Contextual variation in the effect of unemployment on subjective wellbeing in the United States
Doing gender and the surname choices of married women
Individual Behaviors and Health Inequalities
We evaluate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for preterm birth in Mexico using microdata that include all births from 2014 to 2022. The country's hybrid public/private healthcare system allows us to examine how women's adaptive behaviors to the health crisis shaped their birth outcomes. The proportion of women giving birth in private hospitals increased dramatically after the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. This was likely a strateg…
Indigeneity in the Americas
Indigenous peoples have long been classified based on cultural features. Reflecting changing nation-state projects and scholarly trends, Latin American censuses traditionally used Indigenous language proficiency to classify Indigenous populations. However, most Latin American censuses now prioritize the internationally sanctioned standard of self-identification. There is little understanding, though, of how language and physical traits are relate…
Disparate Effects of Disruptive Events on Children
Disruptive events such as economic recessions, natural disasters, job loss, and divorce are highly prevalent among American families. These events can have a long-lasting impact when experienced during childhood, potentially altering academic achievement, socioemotional well-being, health and development, and later life socioeconomic status. Much research has considered the overall impact of disruptive events on children's lives, but the conseque…
Fertility in a Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by social and economic changes previously associated with fertility delay and reduction, sparking widespread discussion of a "baby bust" in the United States. We examine fertility trends using restricted vital statistics data from California, a diverse population of 40 million, contributing 12 percent of U.S. births. Using time series models that account for longer-run fertility trends, we observe modest, sho…
Early-Life Exposures and Social Stratification
Adverse environmental exposures-war and violence, natural disasters, escalating heat, worsening air quality-experienced in pregnancy are consequential for multiple domains of well-being over the life course, including health, cognitive development, schooling, and earnings. Though these environmental exposures become embodied via biological processes, they are fundamentally sociological phenomena: Their emergence, allocation, and impact are struct…
Impact of Medicaid Expansion on Interpregnancy Interval
ACA Medicaid expansion did not have an impact on risk of short IPI. Preventing short IPI may require more comprehensive policy interventions in addition to health care access
Unequal effects of disruptive events
Disruptive events have significant consequences for the individuals and families who experience them, but these effects do not occur equally across the population. While some groups are strongly affected, others experience few consequences. We review recent findings on inequality in the effects of disruptive events. We consider heterogeneity based on socioeconomic resources, race/ethnicity, the likelihood of experiencing disruption, and contextua…
The Unequal Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Infant Health
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a large toll on population health and well-being. We examine the consequences of prenatal exposure for infant health, through which the pandemic may have lasting intergenerational effects. We examine multiple pathways by which the pandemic shaped birth outcomes and socioeconomic disparities in these consequences. Analysis of more than 3.5 million birth records in California with universal information on COVID infec…
The Transition to Fatherhood and the Health of Men
Objective This study examines the impact of fatherhood on diverse health behaviors and outcomes among a representative sample of Millennial men in the United States. Background Much research explores the consequences of parenthood for women, but less is known about health outcomes and trajectories of men who become fathers. Theoretical approaches suggest both health‐enhancing changes driven by social control and a new father identity, and health‐…
The Political Context and Infant Health in the United States
Most social determinants of health are shaped by political decisions. However, beyond specific policies, there is limited empirical investigation into the consequences of the changing political context on population health in the United States. We examine a salient political factor-the party of the president and governor-as a determinant of infant health between 1971 and 2018 using a battery of fixed-effects models. We focus on infant health beca…
The Normativity of Marriage and the Marriage Premium for Children's Outcomes
Children born to married parents have better health, behavioral, educational, and economic outcomes than children of unmarried mothers. This association, known as the “marriage premium,” has been interpreted as emerging from the selectivity of parents who marry and from a positive effect of marriage. The authors suggest that the positive effect of marriage could be contextual, emerging from the normativity of marriage in society. They test this h…
Educational mobility in developing countries
This paper reviews the small but growing literature on intergenerational educational mobility in the developing world. Education is a critical determinant of economic well-being, and it predicts a range of non-pecuniary outcomes such as marriage, fertility, health, crime, and political attitudes. We show that developing nations feature stronger intergenerational educational persistence than high-income countries, in spite of substantial education…
Restrictive Immigration Law and Birth Outcomes of Immigrant Women
Unauthorized immigration is one of the most contentious policy issues in the United States. In an attempt to curb unauthorized migration, many states have considered restrictive laws intended to make life so difficult for unauthorized immigrants that they would choose to leave the country. Arizona's Senate Bill 1070, enacted in 2010, was a pioneering example of these efforts. Using population-level natality data and causal inference methods, we e…
Varieties of Indigeneity in the Americas
We examine sources of indigenous identity in the two countries with the largest indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere—Mexico and Peru. We find that the size of the indigenous population varies dramatically depending on the measure of indigeneity used, and that using multiple measures captures distinct modes of indigeneity. Using latent class analysis, we find that contemporary indigenous classification clusters around four types, which…
Early-Life Circumstances and Their Effects Over the Life Course
Prenatal Exposure to an Acute Stressor and Children’s Cognitive Outcomes
Exposure to environmental stressors is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic lines and may have enduring negative consequences, even when experienced before birth. Yet, estimating the consequences of prenatal stress on children’s outcomes is complicated by the issue of confounding (i.e., unobserved factors correlated with stress exposure and with children’s outcomes). I combine a natural experiment—a strong earthquake in …
Estimating Intergenerational Mobility With Grouped Data
This article distinguishes three measures of intergenerational economic mobility that emerge when the population is divided into groups: overall individual mobility, within-group mobility, and between-group mobility. We clarify their properties and the relationship between them. We then evaluate Clark's use of surname between-group persistence as a preferred measure of intergenerational mobility in the book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the Hi…
Intergenerational Mobility at the Top of the Educational Distribution
Research has shown that intergenerational mobility is higher among individuals with a college degree than those with lower levels of schooling. However, mobility declines among graduate degree holders. This finding questions the meritocratic power of higher education. Prior research has been hampered, however, by the small samples of advanced degree holders in representative surveys. Drawing on a large longitudinal data set of PhD holders-the Sur…
Means-Tested School Vouchers and Educational Achievement
Chile features a universal school choice system, in which a government voucher provides families an opportunity to send students to public or private schools of their choosing. Since its implementation in 1981, the amount of the voucher was flat without adjustments for family income, creating incentives for schools to enroll students from economically advantaged families. In 2008, a policy change adjusted voucher values by the poverty level of st…
Inequality
The increase in economic disparities over the past 30 years has prompted extensive research on the causes and consequences of inequality both in the United States and, more recently, globally. This review provides an update of research on the patterns and causes of economic inequality in the United States, including inequality of earnings, wealth, and opportunity. We also explore the social and political consequences of inequality, particularly i…
Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility across Levels of Schooling in the United States
A quarter century ago, an important finding in stratification research showed that the intergenerational occupational association was much weaker among college graduates than among those with lower levels of education. This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the “meritocratic power” of a college degree. Drawing on five longitudinal data sets, the author analyzes intergenerational mobility in terms of class, occupational status, earnin…
Unequal But Fluid
A major finding in comparative mobility research is the high similarity across countries and the lack of association between mobility and other national attributes, with one exception: higher inequality seems to be associated with lower mobility. Evidence for the mobility-inequality link is, however, inconclusive, largely because most mobility studies have been conducted in advanced countries with relatively similar levels of inequality. This art…
The Effect of Maternal Stress on Birth Outcomes
A growing body of research highlights that in utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This article examines the effect of one such condition—prenatal maternal stress—on birth weight, an early outcome shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment later in life. Exploiting a major earthquake as a source of acute stress and using a…
Analyses of Intergenerational Mobility
This article reviews the sociological and economic literature on intergenerational mobility. Findings on social class, occupational status, earnings, and income mobility are discussed and discrepancies among them are evaluated. The review also examines nonlinearities in the intergenerational association, variation in mobility across advanced industrial countries, and recent mobility trends in the United States. The literature suggests an associat…
Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality
Prompted by new data and a renewed concern about equality of opportunity, the study of intergenerational mobility has flourished in Latin America in the past decade. Although analysis is still restricted to a handful of countries, one conclusion appears clear: Intergenerational income mobility is weaker in Latin America than in industrial countries and is characterized by 'persistence at the top,' a pattern consistent with the high levels of econ…
Bringing the schools back in
Educational assortative mating and economic inequality
Educational assortative mating and economic inequality are likely to be endogenously determined, but very little research exists on their empirical association. Using census data and log-linear and log-multiplicative methods, I compare the patterns of educational assortative mating in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and explore the association between marital sorting and earnings inequality across countries. The analysis finds substantial variation in…
Privatization Reform and Inequality of Educational Opportunity
Chile has experienced considerable educational expansion over the past few decades, as well as a privatization reform in 1981 that introduced full parental choice through a voucher system, in the context of a market-oriented transformation of the country. Using a cohort analysis of the 2001 Chilean Mobility Survey, this article examines trends in educational stratification in Chile over the past 50 years, with a focus on the changes that followed…
Prenatal Exposure to Violence and Birth Weight in Mexico
This article examines the effect of maternal exposure to local homicides on birth weight. We create a monthly panel by merging all births in Mexico from 2008 to 2010 with homicide data at the municipality level. Findings from fixed-effects models indicate that exposure to homicides in the first trimester of gestation increases infant birth weight and reduces the proportion of low birth weight. The effect is not driven by fertility or migration re…
Trust and reciprocity
The social capital literature has focused on the functional and structural properties of social relations, partially neglecting the way in which they are experienced by individuals. Drawing on anthropological and social theory, this article distinguishes two ideal-typical forms of social capital - reciprocity and trust - based on the meaning of the social relations that embed them. Reciprocity is the type of social capital embedded within persona…
Compensation or Reinforcement? The Stratification of Parental Responses to Children’s Early Ability
Theory and empirical evidence suggest that parents allocate their investments unequally among their children, thus inducing within-family inequality. We investigate whether parents reinforce or compensate for initial ability differences between their children as well as whether these parental responses vary by family socioeconomic status (SES). Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) and a twin fixed-effects approach t…
Patterns of Racial and Educational Assortative Mating in Brazil
Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and a middle tier of “brown” individuals. If exchange is…
Social status and cultural consumption
Economic Crisis and Inequality of Educational Opportunity in Latin America
Research in the industrialized world shows that the influence of family background on educational attainment has remained stable or declined over time. In contrast, very little is known about the developing world. Using high-quality data sets and a standard protocol, this article offers a comparative analysis of trends in educational stratification in four Latin American countries-Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Latin America provides an int…
Pathways of change in social mobility
Intergenerational Mobility and Equality of Opportunity
Intergenerational mobility-the association between parents' and adult children's economic wellbeing-is an important sociological concept because it provides information about inequality of opportunity in society, and it has gained relevance in the recent past due to the increase economic inequality in most of the affluent world. This article provides an overview of the different measures of mobility used by sociologists and economists, as well as…
Intergenerational Mobility at the Top of the Educational Distribution
Research has shown that intergenerational mobility is higher among individuals with a college degree than those with lower levels of schooling. However, mobility declines among graduate degree holders. This finding questions the meritocratic power of higher education. Prior research has been hampered, however, by the small samples of advanced degree holders in representative surveys. Drawing on a large longitudinal data set of PhD holders-the Sur…
Exposure to Local Homicides and Early Educational Achievement in Mexico
We investigate the effect of children's exposure to local violence on grade failure in Mexico. We construct an annual panel of all elementary schools from 1990 to 2010 and merge municipality-level homicide rates to analyze the effect of exposure to local homicide. Using a variety of causal inference techniques, we consistently find that exposure to local violence increases the probability of failing a grade in elementary school. This effect is ne…
The Political Context and Infant Health in the United States
Most social determinants of health are shaped by political decisions. However, beyond specific policies, there is limited empirical investigation into the consequences of the changing political context on population health in the United States. We examine a salient political factor-the party of the president and governor-as a determinant of infant health between 1971 and 2018 using a battery of fixed-effects models. We focus on infant health beca…
Parental wealth and children's outcomes over the life-course in Brazil
Prenatal Exposure to an Acute Stressor and Children’s Cognitive Outcomes
Exposure to environmental stressors is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic lines and may have enduring negative consequences, even when experienced before birth. Yet, estimating the consequences of prenatal stress on children’s outcomes is complicated by the issue of confounding (i.e., unobserved factors correlated with stress exposure and with children’s outcomes). I combine a natural experiment—a strong earthquake in …
Estimating Intergenerational Mobility With Grouped Data
This article distinguishes three measures of intergenerational economic mobility that emerge when the population is divided into groups: overall individual mobility, within-group mobility, and between-group mobility. We clarify their properties and the relationship between them. We then evaluate Clark's use of surname between-group persistence as a preferred measure of intergenerational mobility in the book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the Hi…
Declining Racial Stratification in Marriage Choices? Trends in Black/White Status Exchange in the United States, 1980 to 2010
The status exchange hypothesis suggests that partners in black/white marriages in the United States trade racial for educational status, indicating strong hierarchical barriers between racial groups. The authors examine trends in status exchange in black/white marriages and cohabitations between 1980 and 2010, a period during which these unions increased from 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent of all young couples. The authors find that status exchange b…
Unequal effects of disruptive events
Disruptive events have significant consequences for the individuals and families who experience them, but these effects do not occur equally across the population. While some groups are strongly affected, others experience few consequences. We review recent findings on inequality in the effects of disruptive events. We consider heterogeneity based on socioeconomic resources, race/ethnicity, the likelihood of experiencing disruption, and contextua…
Unequal But Fluid
A major finding in comparative mobility research is the high similarity across countries and the lack of association between mobility and other national attributes, with one exception: higher inequality seems to be associated with lower mobility. Evidence for the mobility-inequality link is, however, inconclusive, largely because most mobility studies have been conducted in advanced countries with relatively similar levels of inequality. This art…
Privatization Reform and Inequality of Educational Opportunity
Chile has experienced considerable educational expansion over the past few decades, as well as a privatization reform in 1981 that introduced full parental choice through a voucher system, in the context of a market-oriented transformation of the country. Using a cohort analysis of the 2001 Chilean Mobility Survey, this article examines trends in educational stratification in Chile over the past 50 years, with a focus on the changes that followed…
Product Review
Social status and cultural consumption
Inequality
The increase in economic disparities over the past 30 years has prompted extensive research on the causes and consequences of inequality both in the United States and, more recently, globally. This review provides an update of research on the patterns and causes of economic inequality in the United States, including inequality of earnings, wealth, and opportunity. We also explore the social and political consequences of inequality, particularly i…
Forthcoming Article List for 44
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Social Status and Cultural Consumption
How does cultural hierarchy relate to social hierarchy? Do the more advantaged consume 'high' culture, while the less advantaged consume popular culture? Or has cultural consumption in contemporary societies become individualised to such a degree that there is no longer any social basis for cultural consumption? Leading scholars from the UK, the USA, Chile, France, Hungary and the Netherlands systematically examine the social stratification of ar…
Intergenerational Influences of Wealth in Mexico
Using the 2006 Mexican Social Mobility Survey, this research evaluates the influence of parental wealth on several outcomes of adult children, including educational attainment, consumption level, asset holdings, home ownership, and value of residence. Two mechanisms of parental influence on economic wellbeing are explored: an indirect effect mediated by parental investment in human capital, and the direct transfer of resources. Three main finding…
Bringing the schools back in
Pathways of change in social mobility
Educational assortative mating and economic inequality
Educational assortative mating and economic inequality are likely to be endogenously determined, but very little research exists on their empirical association. Using census data and log-linear and log-multiplicative methods, I compare the patterns of educational assortative mating in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and explore the association between marital sorting and earnings inequality across countries. The analysis finds substantial variation in…
Economic Crisis and Inequality of Educational Opportunity in Latin America
Research in the industrialized world shows that the influence of family background on educational attainment has remained stable or declined over time. In contrast, very little is known about the developing world. Using high-quality data sets and a standard protocol, this article offers a comparative analysis of trends in educational stratification in four Latin American countries-Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Latin America provides an int…
Is There Such Thing as Middle Class Values? Class Differences, Values and Political Orientations in Latin America
Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. This paper investigates the relation between class (measured by position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries. The analysis finds that both a continuous measure of income and categorical measures of income-based class are robustly associated with values. Both income and …
Parental wealth and children's outcomes over the life-course in Brazil
The Effect of Maternal Stress on Birth Outcomes
A growing body of research highlights that in utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This article examines the effect of one such condition—prenatal maternal stress—on birth weight, an early outcome shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment later in life. Exploiting a major earthquake as a source of acute stress and using a…
Trust and reciprocity
The social capital literature has focused on the functional and structural properties of social relations, partially neglecting the way in which they are experienced by individuals. Drawing on anthropological and social theory, this article distinguishes two ideal-typical forms of social capital - reciprocity and trust - based on the meaning of the social relations that embed them. Reciprocity is the type of social capital embedded within persona…
Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility across Levels of Schooling in the United States
A quarter century ago, an important finding in stratification research showed that the intergenerational occupational association was much weaker among college graduates than among those with lower levels of education. This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the “meritocratic power” of a college degree. Drawing on five longitudinal data sets, the author analyzes intergenerational mobility in terms of class, occupational status, earnin…
Panel Conditioning in a Longitudinal Study of Adolescents' Substance Use
Panel surveys are widely used in sociology to examine life-course trajectories and to assess causal effects. However, when using panel data researchers usually assume that the act of measuring respondents' attitudes and behaviors has no effect on the attributes being measured or on the accuracy of reports about those attributes. Evidence from cognitive psychology, marketing research, political science and other fields suggests that this assumptio…
Una clasificación de clases para la sociedad chilena
This paper builds up empirically a class scheme fit to Chile and analyzes the pattern of cross generation mobility in the country, which is based on the weberian notion of class. The analysis shows that the Chilean class structure is not shaped by structural differentials in the national labor market, such as the distinctions between formal and informal sectors, or private vs. public. Using this class scheme for measuring cross generation mobilit…
Patterns of Racial and Educational Assortative Mating in Brazil
Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and a middle tier of “brown” individuals. If exchange is…
Panel Conditioning in a Longitudinal Study of Illicit Behaviors
Journal Article Panel Conditioning in a Longitudinal Study of Illicit Behaviors Get access Andrew Halpern-Manners, Andrew Halpern-Manners * Andrew Halpern-Manners is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. John Robert Warren is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, and training director at the Minnesota Population Center. Florencia Torche is an ass…
Prenatal Exposure to Violence and Birth Weight in Mexico
This article examines the effect of maternal exposure to local homicides on birth weight. We create a monthly panel by merging all births in Mexico from 2008 to 2010 with homicide data at the municipality level. Findings from fixed-effects models indicate that exposure to homicides in the first trimester of gestation increases infant birth weight and reduces the proportion of low birth weight. The effect is not driven by fertility or migration re…
Exposure to Local Homicides and Early Educational Achievement in Mexico
We investigate the effect of children's exposure to local violence on grade failure in Mexico. We construct an annual panel of all elementary schools from 1990 to 2010 and merge municipality-level homicide rates to analyze the effect of exposure to local homicide. Using a variety of causal inference techniques, we consistently find that exposure to local violence increases the probability of failing a grade in elementary school. This effect is ne…
Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality
Prompted by new data and a renewed concern about equality of opportunity, the study of intergenerational mobility has flourished in Latin America in the past decade. Although analysis is still restricted to a handful of countries, one conclusion appears clear: Intergenerational income mobility is weaker in Latin America than in industrial countries and is characterized by 'persistence at the top,' a pattern consistent with the high levels of econ…
Movilidad Intergeneracional y Desigualdad
El estudio de la movilidad ha cobrado importancia en la última década en Latinoamérica, empujado por la reciente disponibilidad de datos y por una renovada preocupación por la igualdad de oportunidades. Aunque el análisis de la movilidad aún está restringido a pocos países de la regi ón, una conclusión es clara: La movilidad intergeneracional de ingresos es menor en América Latina que en países industrializados, y se caracteriza por la 'persisten…
Sociology (39 works) · Economics (33 works) · Demography (30 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Demographic economics (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Population (22 works) · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies (21 works) · Demography (20 works) · Economic growth (15 works)