D Conley
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 14207 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | D Conley |
| NOMBRES | D |
| APELLIDO | Conley |
| FIRMA | CONLEY D |
| AFILIACIONES | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5174-7222 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 71 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 723 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 71 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
The Influence of Extended Kin on Educational Achievement
Despite growing interest in the potential influence of grandparents on grandchild status attainment, research has not addressed whether the ordinal position or number of grandchildren affects outcomes. The authors apply sibling and cousin fixed effects analyses to Swedish population data (cohorts born 1972–2003; N=2,326,309), to examine how cousin order and cousin group size influence grade point average (GPA) percentile rank at the end of compul…
Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics
In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and poten…
Child-Driven Parenting
A growing literature points to children’s influence on parents’ behavior, including parental investments in children. Further, previous research has shown differential parental response by socioeconomic status to children’s birth weight, cognitive ability, and school outcomes—all early life predictors of later socioeconomic success. This study considers an even earlier, more exogenous predictor of parental investments: offspring genotype. Specifi…
Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals
We conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment (EA) in a sample of ~3 million individuals and identify 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A genome-wide polygenic predictor, or polygenic index (PGI), explains 12–16% of EA variance and contributes to risk prediction for ten diseases. Direct effects (i.e., controlling for parental PGIs) explain roughly half th…
Polygenic Scores for Plasticity
Fertility, health, education, and other outcomes of interest to demographers are the product of an individual's genetic makeup and their social environment. Yet, gene × environment (G×E) research deploys a limited toolkit on the genetic side to study the gene–environment interplay, relying on polygenic scores (PGSs) that reflect the influence of genetics on levels of an outcome. In this article, we develop a genetic summary measure better suited …
The Economic Red Shift
Genetic Influences on Educational Achievement in Cross-National Perspective
There is a growing interest in how social conditions moderate genetic influences on education [gene-environment interactions (GxE)]. Previous research has focused on the family, specifically parents' social background, and has neglected the institutional environment. To assess the impact of macro-level influences, we compare genetic influences on educational achievement and their social stratification across Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the Unite…
Past is future for the era of Covid-19 research in the social sciences
Computational properties of use of biological organisms or to the construction of computers can emerge as collective properties of systems having a large number of simple equivalent components (or neurons). The physical meaning of content-addressable ...
Experimenting With Online Governance
To solve the problems they face, online communities adopt comprehensive governance methods including committees, boards, juries, and even more complex institutional logics. Helping these kinds of communities succeed will require categorizing best practices and creating toolboxes that fit the needs of specific communities. Beyond such applied uses, there is also a potential for an institutional logic itself to evolve, taking advantage of feedback …
Gene-environment interactions and school tracking during secondary education
Sibling Similarity in Education Across and Within Societies
The extent to which siblings resemble each other measures the omnibus impact of family background on life chances. We study sibling similarity in cognitive skills, school grades, and educational attainment in Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compare sibling similarity by parental education and occupation within these societies. The comparison of sibling correlations across and within societies a…
Genome-Wide Heritability Estimates for Family Life Course Complexity
Sequence analysis is an established method used to study the complexity of family life courses. Although individual and societal characteristics have been linked with the complexity of family trajectories, social scientists have neglected the potential role of genetic factors in explaining variation in family transitions and events across the life course. We estimate the genetic contribution to sequence complexity and a wide range of family demog…
Public attitudes toward genetic risk scoring in medicine and beyond
The Ghost of Merton Past and Present
The Production of Inequalities within Families and across Generations
There has long been interest in the extent to which effects of social stratification extend and persist across generations. We take a novel approach to this question by asking whether birth order in the parental generation influences the educational attainment of their children. To address this question, we use Swedish population data on cohorts born 1960-1982. To study the effects of parental birth order, we use cousin fixed effects comparisons.…
Birth Weight and Development
New Evidence of Skin Color Bias and Health Outcomes Using Sibling Difference Models
In this research note, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to determine whether darker skin tone predicts hypertension among siblings using a family fixed-effects analytic strategy. We find that even after we account for common family background and home environment, body mass index, age, sex, and outdoor activity, darker skin color significantly predicts hypertension incidence among sibling…
Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals
Here we conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identify 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant SNPs. For the SNPs taken together, we found evidence of heterogeneous effects across environments. The SNPs implicate genes involved in brain-development processes and neuron-to-neuron communication. In a separate analysis of the X chromosome, we identify…
The Effects of Active and Passive Leisure on Cognition in Children
Leisure time activity is often positioned as a key factor in child development, yet we know relatively little about the causal significance of various specific activities or the magnitude of their effects. Here, we couple individual fixed effects and instrumental variable approaches in trying to determine whether specific forms of leisure contribute to gains in test performance over time. We merge a restricted access version of the Panel Study of…
Live birth sex ratios and father's geographic origins in Jerusalem, 1964–1976
OBJECTIVE: To examine whether ancestry influenced sex ratios of offspring in a birth cohort before parental antenatal sex selection influenced offspring sex. METHODS: We measured the sex ratio as the percent of males according to countries of birth of paternal and maternal grandfathers in 91,459 live births from 1964 to 1976 in the Jerusalem Perinatal Study. Confidence limits (CI) were computed based on an expected sex ratio of 1.05, which is 51.…
Modeling Gene‐Environment Interactions With Quasi‐Natural Experiments
This overview develops new empirical models that can effectively document Gene × Environment (G×E) interactions in observational data. Current G×E studies are often unable to support causal inference because they use endogenous measures of the environment or fail to adequately address the nonrandom distribution of genes across environments, confounding estimates. Comprehensive measures of genetic variation are incorporated into quasi‐natural expe…
Tradeoff Between Distributed Social Learning and Herding Effect in Online Rating Systems
We investigated how social diffusion increased client participation in an online rating system and, in turn, how this herding effect may affect the metrics of client feedback over the course of years. In a field study, we set up a transparent feedback system for university services: During the process of making service requests, clients were presented with short-term trends of client satisfaction with relevant service outcomes. Deploying this fee…
The challenges of GxE
Does the Gender of Offspring Affect Parental Political Orientation
Recently, offspring sex has been widely used as a natural experiment and argued to induce changes in political orientation among parents. However, prior results have been contradictory: in the UK, researchers found that having daughters led to parents favoring left-wing political parties and to holding more liberal views on family/gender roles, whereas in the United States scholars found that daughters were associated with more Republican (righti…
Robust Null Findings on Offspring Sex and Political Orientation
In an earlier paper, we deployed the European Social Survey (ESS) and the General Social Survey (GSS) to conduct the largest analysis to date examining the question of whether child sex affects parent political orientation. We found null effects in contrast to earlier, smaller studies. In the current issue, Hopcroft (2016) argues that our null findings may have been obtained due to sample restrictions and measurement error arising from the fact t…
Is Biology Destiny? Birth Weight and Life Chances
Two key questions are addressed regarding the intersection of socioeconomic status, biology, and low birth weight over the life course. First, do the income and other socioeconomic conditions of a mother during her pregnancy affect her chances of having a low-birth-weight infant net of her own birth weight, that of the father, and other family-related, unobserved factors? Second, does an individual's birth weight status affect his or her adult li…
Capital for College
This article argues that traditional models of educational attainment have neglected a substantial portion of the economic resources available to parents to facilitate their children's success in schooling: wealth. In multigenerational analyses of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, it demonstrates that parental wealth, as measured by net worth, has a strong, nonlinear effect on the postsecondary schooling of offspring-net of income and other mea…
Home Ownership, Social Insurance, and the Welfare State
Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype
Parental education is the strongest measured predictor of offspring education, and thus many scholars see the parent-child correlation in educational attainment as an important measure of social mobility. But if social changes or policy interventions are going to have dynastic effects, we need to know what accounts for this intergenerational association, that is, whether it is primarily environmental or genetic in origin. Thus, to understand whet…
Decomposing the Black-White Wealth Gap
Much research has shown that even after controlling for income, African Americans suffer from drastically lower net worths than their white counterparts; these differences in net worth have important implications for the overall well-being of blacks and whites. If not directly from labor market disadvantages-i.e., income differentials-then from what does this racial gap in wealth arise? The current study assesses two complementary accounts of thi…
Welfare State and Infant Mortality
This article seeks to understand the effects of welfare-state spending on infant mortality rates. Infant mortality was chosen for its importance as a social indicator and its putative sensitivity to state action over a short time span. Country fixed-effects models are used to determine that public health spending does have a significant impact in lowering infant mortality rates, net of other factors, such as economic development, and that this ef…
Sibship Sex Composition
This study decomposes the detrimental effects of increased sibship on educational attainment by the sex of the respondent and his/her siblings. Previous theories regarding the interaction of gender and sibship sex composition are reviewed and a new hypothesis is offered: a revision of the sex minority hypothesis, positing that an increased number of siblings of the opposite sex (regardless of the of the respondent's gender) are harmful to educati…
Explaining sibling differences in achievement and behavioral outcomes
Socio-Genomic Research Using Genome-Wide Molecular Data
Recent advances in molecular genetics have provided social scientists with new tools with which to explore human behavior. By deploying genomic analysis, we can now explore long-term patterns of human migration and mating, explore the biological aspects of important sociological outcomes such as educational attainment, and, most importantly, model gene-by-environment interaction effects. The intuition motivating much socio-genomic research is tha…
All in the family
Birth Weight and Income
This paper attempts to answer a series of questions regarding the interaction of income and birth weight across generations. First, does the effect of the income of a mother during her pregnancy on her infant's birth weight depend on the family's birth weight history (genetic predisposition)? Second, does the effect of low birth weight status on adult life chances depend on income during early childhood? These questions have implications for the …
The Effect of Daughters on Partisanship and Social Attitudes Toward Women
Washington ( ) finds that daughters promote liberal voting (at least with respect to women's issues) among U.S. Congress members and attributes this finding to socialization. However, daughters’ influence could manifest differently for elite politicians and the general citizenry either due to self‐selection or the Trivers‐Willard hypothesis, which suggests that parents invest differently in male and female children depending on their social statu…
Genetic Interactions with Prenatal Social Environment
Numerous studies report gene-environment interactions, suggesting that specific alleles have different effects on social outcomes depending on environment. In all these studies, however, environmental conditions are potentially endogenous to unmeasured genetic characteristics. That is, it could be that the observed interaction effects actually reflect underlying genetic tendencies that lead individuals into certain environments. What is critical …
Sibling Similarity in Education Across and Within Societies
The extent to which siblings resemble each other measures the omnibus impact of family background on life chances. We study sibling similarity in cognitive skills, school grades, and educational attainment in Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compare sibling similarity by parental education and occupation within these societies. The comparison of sibling correlations across and within societies a…
Family Background, Race, and Labor Market Inequality
For decades, social scientists have relied on sibling correlations as indicative of the effect of “global family background” on socioeconomic status. This study advances this line of inquiry by drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze racial differences in siblings' labor market and socioeconomic outcomes. We find that African Americans have lower sibling correlations in labor market earnings and family income than white…
The Challenge of Causal Inference in Gene–Environment Interaction Research
The integration of genetics and the social sciences will lead to a more complex understanding of the articulation between social and biological processes, although the empirical difficulties inherent in this integration are large. One key challenge is the implications of moving “outside the lab” and away from the experimental tools available for research with model organisms. Social science research methods used to examine human behavior in nonex…
The Promise and Challenges of Incorporating Genetic Data into Longitudinal Social Science Surveys and Research
In this paper, I argue that social science and genomics can be integrated; however, the way this marriage is currently occurring rests on spurious methods and assumptions and, as a result, will yield few lasting insights. However, recent advances in both econometrics and in developmental genomics provide scientists with a novel opportunity to understand how genes and environment interact to produce social outcomes. Key to any causal inference abo…
The Effects of Active and Passive Leisure on Cognition in Children
Leisure time activity is often positioned as a key factor in child development, yet we know relatively little about the causal significance of various specific activities or the magnitude of their effects. Here, we couple individual fixed effects and instrumental variable approaches in trying to determine whether specific forms of leisure contribute to gains in test performance over time. We merge a restricted access version of the Panel Study of…
The Emergence of Socio-Genomics
The Long-Term Effects of Military Conscription on Mortality
Research on the effects of Vietnam military service suggests that Vietnam veterans experienced significantly higher mortality than the civilian population at large. These results, however, may be biased by nonrandom selection into the military if unobserved background differences between veterans and nonveterans affect mortality directly. To generate unbiased estimates of exposure to conscription on mortality, the present study compares the obser…
Health Shocks and Social Drift
Jason Thompson, Dalton Conley, Health Shocks and Social Drift: Examining the Relationship Between Acute Illness and Family Wealth, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 6, Wealth Inequality: Economic and Social Dimensions (October 2016), pp. 153-171
Beyond Orchids and Dandelions
The persistence of behaviorally deleterious genes in the human population poses an interesting question for population genetics: If certain alleles at these loci are deleterious, why have they survived in the population? We consider evidence for phenotypic capacitance and/or frequency-dependent selection for an allele that has been putatively shown to have negative associations with human behaviors (the "short" 5-HTT promoter region allele) yet h…
Genetic Influences on Educational Achievement in Cross-National Perspective
There is a growing interest in how social conditions moderate genetic influences on education [gene-environment interactions (GxE)]. Previous research has focused on the family, specifically parents' social background, and has neglected the institutional environment. To assess the impact of macro-level influences, we compare genetic influences on educational achievement and their social stratification across Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the Unite…
Gene-environment interactions and school tracking during secondary education
The Bell Curve Revisited
In 1994, the publication of Herrnstein's and Murray's The Bell Curve resulted in a social science maelstrom of responses. In the present study, we argue that Herrnstein's and Murray's assertions were made prematurely, on their own terms, given the lack of data available to test the role of genotype in the dynamics of achievement and attainment in U.S. society. Today, however, the scientific community has access to at least one dataset that is nat…
Getting it together
The Effects of Poverty on Child Health and Development
Poverty has been shown to negatively influence child health and development along a number of dimensions. For example, poverty–net of a variety of potentially confounding factors—is associated with increased neonatal and post-neonatal mortality rates, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents or physical abuse/neglect, higher risk for asthma, and lower developmental scores in a range of tests at multiple ages. Despite the extensive litera…
Getting Into the Black
Journal Article Getting Into the Black: Race, Wealth, and Public Policy Get access Dalton Conley Dalton Conley DALTON CONLEY is associate professor of sociology and director of the Center for Applied Social Science Research at New York University. He is author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth and Social Policy in America and the forthcoming ethnographic memoir, Honky. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google…
Honky
This personal memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view—the streets, buses, and playgrounds—this book poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often fun…
Being Black, Living in the Red
Being Black, Living in the Red demonstrates that many differences between blacks and whites stem not from race but from economic inequalities that have accumulated over the course of American history. Property ownership - as measured by net worth - reflects this legacy of economic oppression. The racial discrepancy in wealth holdings leads to advantages for whites in the form of better schools, more desirable residences, higher wages, and more op…
Race and the inheritance of low birth weight
This paper uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to address the black-white difference in propensities toward low birth weight (LBW). We determine that socioeconomic conditions account for some variation in low birth weight across race. Further, while race differences in the risk of low birth weight cannot be explained entirely, we find that the inheritance of parental birth weight status dramatically reduces …
Is Biology Destiny? Birth Weight and Life Chances
Two key questions are addressed regarding the intersection of socioeconomic status, biology, and low birth weight over the life course. First, do the income and other socioeconomic conditions of a mother during her pregnancy affect her chances of having a low-birth-weight infant net of her own birth weight, that of the father, and other family-related, unobserved factors? Second, does an individual's birth weight status affect his or her adult li…
Being Black, Living in the Red
Sibship Sex Composition
This study decomposes the detrimental effects of increased sibship on educational attainment by the sex of the respondent and his/her siblings. Previous theories regarding the interaction of gender and sibship sex composition are reviewed and a new hypothesis is offered: a revision of the sex minority hypothesis, positing that an increased number of siblings of the opposite sex (regardless of the of the respondent's gender) are harmful to educati…
Birth Weight and Income
This paper attempts to answer a series of questions regarding the interaction of income and birth weight across generations. First, does the effect of the income of a mother during her pregnancy on her infant's birth weight depend on the family's birth weight history (genetic predisposition)? Second, does the effect of low birth weight status on adult life chances depend on income during early childhood? These questions have implications for the …
Capital for College
This article argues that traditional models of educational attainment have neglected a substantial portion of the economic resources available to parents to facilitate their children's success in schooling: wealth. In multigenerational analyses of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, it demonstrates that parental wealth, as measured by net worth, has a strong, nonlinear effect on the postsecondary schooling of offspring-net of income and other mea…
Decomposing the Black-White Wealth Gap
Much research has shown that even after controlling for income, African Americans suffer from drastically lower net worths than their white counterparts; these differences in net worth have important implications for the overall well-being of blacks and whites. If not directly from labor market disadvantages-i.e., income differentials-then from what does this racial gap in wealth arise? The current study assesses two complementary accounts of thi…
Welfare State and Infant Mortality
This article seeks to understand the effects of welfare-state spending on infant mortality rates. Infant mortality was chosen for its importance as a social indicator and its putative sensitivity to state action over a short time span. Country fixed-effects models are used to determine that public health spending does have a significant impact in lowering infant mortality rates, net of other factors, such as economic development, and that this ef…
Honky
Color and Money
Black-White Differences in Occupational Prestige
This article examines whether differences in parental occupational prestige mediate or moderate race differences in four indicators of child development-reading scores, math scores, Behavior Problems Index, and health status-using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement. The authors find that although for behavioral problems there is no impact of parental occupational prestige, for reading, math, and health there…
Parental Educational Investment and Children’s Academic Risk
This study uses exogenous variation in sibling sex composition to estimate the causal effect of sibship size on boys’ probabilities of private school attendance and grade retention. Using the 1990 U.S. Census, we find that for second-born boys, increased sibship size reduces the likelihood of private school attendance by six percentage points and increases grade retention by almost one percentage point. Sibship size has no effect for first-born b…
Twin differences in birth weight
Home Ownership, Social Insurance, and the Welfare State
Family Background, Race, and Labor Market Inequality
For decades, social scientists have relied on sibling correlations as indicative of the effect of “global family background” on socioeconomic status. This study advances this line of inquiry by drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze racial differences in siblings' labor market and socioeconomic outcomes. We find that African Americans have lower sibling correlations in labor market earnings and family income than white…
Explaining sibling differences in achievement and behavioral outcomes
Black–White Achievement Gap and Family Wealth
This article examines the extent to which family wealth affects the Black–White test score gap for young children based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (aged 3–12). This study found little evidence that wealth mediated the Black–White test scores gaps, which were eliminated when child and family demographic covariates were held constant. However, family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged ch…
All in the family
The Promise and Challenges of Incorporating Genetic Data into Longitudinal Social Science Surveys and Research
In this paper, I argue that social science and genomics can be integrated; however, the way this marriage is currently occurring rests on spurious methods and assumptions and, as a result, will yield few lasting insights. However, recent advances in both econometrics and in developmental genomics provide scientists with a novel opportunity to understand how genes and environment interact to produce social outcomes. Key to any causal inference abo…
Body Mass Index and Physical Attractiveness
The list experiment is used to detect latent beliefs when researchers suspect a substantial degree of social desirability bias from respondents. This methodology has been used in areas ranging from racial attitudes to political preferences. Meanwhile, social psychologists interested in the salience of physical attributes to social behavior have provided respondents with experimentally altered photographs to test the influence of particular visual…
Sociology (41 obras) · Psychology (38 obras) · Economics (33 obras) · Demography (32 obras) · Biology (29 obras) · Political science (26 obras) · Developmental psychology (20 obras) · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies (20 obras) · Genetics (19 obras) · Population (19 obras)