Felix Elwert
Biographic Data
| ID | 88188 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Felix Elwert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Felix |
| FAMILY NAME | Elwert |
| SIGNATURE | ELWERT F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2111-3103 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 988 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Outcomes from Partner2Lose: A randomized controlled trial to evaluate 24-month weight loss in a partner-assisted intervention
Clinicaltrials.gov NCT03801174, January 11, 2019
Labor Market Consequences of Grandparenthood
Little is known about the labor market consequences of becoming a grandparent. We estimate grandparenthood effects on labor supply and earnings using detailed multigenerational data from Danish population registers. Results show that the consequences of grandparenthood are unequally distributed and starkly patterned. Becoming a grandparent reduces hours worked and income, especially for grandmothers, more so when the grandchild is born to a daugh…
Heterogenous causal effects: Potentials and pitfalls as illustrated with fatherhood and earnings
ObjectiveTo discuss how methods to estimate heterogenous causal effects can be applied in Family Science and to supply empirical examples using the case of fatherhood and earnings.BackgroundMany questions important to family scientists do not focus on one-size-fits-all average effects but rather on whether and how effects differ across groups. Recent methodological advances can assist this latter focus, offering new insights for theory and policy…
Feasible Peer Effects: Experimental Evidence for Deskmate Effects on Educational Achievement and Inequality
Schools routinely employ seating charts to influence educational outcomes. Dependable \nevidence for the causal effects of seating charts on students’ achievement levels and inequality, \nhowever, is scarce. We executed a large pre-registered field experiment to estimate causal peer \neffects on students’ test scores and grades by randomizing the seating charts of 195 classrooms \n(N=3,365 students). We found that neither sitting next to a deskma…
Spillover Effects of Prenatal Care Coordination on Older Siblings Beyond the Mother-Infant Dyad
BACKGROUND: Pregnancy care coordination increases preventive care receipt for mothers and infants. Whether such services affect other family members' health care is unknown. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the spillover effect of maternal exposure to Wisconsin Medicaid's Prenatal Care Coordination (PNCC) program during pregnancy with a younger sibling on the preventive care receipt for an older child. RESEARCH DESIGN: Gain-score regressions-a sibling fixe…
Peer effects on academic self-concept: A Large Randomized Field Experiment
Social theories posit that peers affect students' academic self-concept (ASC). Most prominently, Big-Fish-Little-Pond, invidious comparison, and relative deprivation theories predict that exposure to academically stronger peers decreases students' ASC, and exposure to academically weaker peers increases students' ASC. These propositions have not yet been tested experimentally. We executed a large and pre-registered field experiment that randomize…
Rearranging the Desk Chairs: A Large Randomized Field Experiment on the Effects of Close Contact on Interethnic Relations
Contact theory predicts that interethnic exposure reduces antiminority discrimination. By contrast, conflict theory predicts that interethnic exposure worsens discrimination. Received scope conditions, however, are vague and do not properly differentiate between the domains of the theories. Furthermore, prior evidence is mostly correlational, and supportive field experiments for contact theory have largely accrued in rarefied settings. This begs …
Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality
It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into compo…
Yes, You Can! Effects of Transparent Admission Standards on High School Track Choice: A Randomized Field Experiment
High school track choice determines college access in many countries. We hypothesize that some qualified students avoid the college-bound track in high school simply because they overestimate admission requirements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a randomized field experiment that communicated the admission standards of local secondary schools on the academic track to students in Hungary before the application deadline. We targeted the sub…
The Future Strikes Back: Using Future Treatments to Detect and Reduce Hidden Bias
Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved confounder that affects treatment also affects the future value of the treatment. Future treatments thus p…
The causal interpretation of estimated associations in regression models
A common causal identification strategy in political science is selection on observables. This strategy assumes one observes a set of covariates that is, after statistical adjustment, sufficient to make treatment status as-if random. Under adjustment methods such as matching or inverse probability weighting, coefficients for control variables are treated as nuisance parameters and are not directly estimated. This is in direct contrast to regressi…
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in th…
Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable
Endogenous selection bias is a central problem for causal inference. Recognizing the problem, however, can be difficult in practice. This article introduces a purely graphical way of characterizing endogenous selection bias and of understanding its consequences ( Hernán et al. 2004 ). We use causal graphs (direct acyclic graphs, or DAGs) to highlight that endogenous selection bias stems from conditioning (e.g., controlling, stratifying, or select…
Graphical Causal Models
Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduati…
The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability
This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on "neighborhood effects" that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the …
Preliminary evidence regarding the hypothesis that the sex ratio at sexual maturity may affect longevity in men
In human populations, variation in mate availability has been linked to various biological and social outcomes, but the possible effect of mate availability on health or survival has not been studied. Unbalanced sex ratios are a concern in many parts of the world, and their implications for the health and survival of the constituent individuals warrant careful investigation. We indexed mate availability with contextual sex ratios and investigated…
The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses
Objectives. We investigated the effect of spousal bereavement on mortality to document cause-specific bereavement effects by the causes of death of both the predecedent spouse and the bereaved partner. Methods. We obtained data from a nationally representative cohort of 373 189 elderly married couples in the United States who were followed from 1993 to 2002. We used competing risk and Cox models in our analyses. Results. For both men and women, t…
Wives and ex-wives: A new test for homogamy bias in the widowhood effect
Increased mortality following the death of a spouse (the “widowhood effect”) may be due to (1) causation, (2) bias from spousal similarity (homogamy), or (3) bias from shared environmental exposures. This article proposes new tests for bias in the widowhood effect by examining husbands, wives, and ex-wives in a longitudinal sample of over 1 million elderly Americans. If the death of an ex-wife has no causal effect on the mortality of her husband,…
Widowhood and mortality among the elderly: The modifying role of neighborhood concentration of widowed individuals
Widowhood and Race
The health effects of marital status are frequently cited in the current debate on marriage promotion, but little is known about how marital health effects vary across groups. This article assembles the largest properly longitudinal and nationally representative dataset of elderly married couples in the United States (N = 410,272 couples) and provides strong evidence that the "widowhood effect"-how the death of a spouse increases the mortality of…
Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduati…
Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable
Endogenous selection bias is a central problem for causal inference. Recognizing the problem, however, can be difficult in practice. This article introduces a purely graphical way of characterizing endogenous selection bias and of understanding its consequences ( Hernán et al. 2004 ). We use causal graphs (direct acyclic graphs, or DAGs) to highlight that endogenous selection bias stems from conditioning (e.g., controlling, stratifying, or select…
The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability
This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on "neighborhood effects" that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the …
The causal interpretation of estimated associations in regression models
A common causal identification strategy in political science is selection on observables. This strategy assumes one observes a set of covariates that is, after statistical adjustment, sufficient to make treatment status as-if random. Under adjustment methods such as matching or inverse probability weighting, coefficients for control variables are treated as nuisance parameters and are not directly estimated. This is in direct contrast to regressi…
Widowhood and Race
The health effects of marital status are frequently cited in the current debate on marriage promotion, but little is known about how marital health effects vary across groups. This article assembles the largest properly longitudinal and nationally representative dataset of elderly married couples in the United States (N = 410,272 couples) and provides strong evidence that the "widowhood effect"-how the death of a spouse increases the mortality of…
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in th…
The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses
Objectives. We investigated the effect of spousal bereavement on mortality to document cause-specific bereavement effects by the causes of death of both the predecedent spouse and the bereaved partner. Methods. We obtained data from a nationally representative cohort of 373 189 elderly married couples in the United States who were followed from 1993 to 2002. We used competing risk and Cox models in our analyses. Results. For both men and women, t…
Widowhood and mortality among the elderly: The modifying role of neighborhood concentration of widowed individuals
Wives and ex-wives: A new test for homogamy bias in the widowhood effect
Increased mortality following the death of a spouse (the “widowhood effect”) may be due to (1) causation, (2) bias from spousal similarity (homogamy), or (3) bias from shared environmental exposures. This article proposes new tests for bias in the widowhood effect by examining husbands, wives, and ex-wives in a longitudinal sample of over 1 million elderly Americans. If the death of an ex-wife has no causal effect on the mortality of her husband,…
Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality
It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into compo…
Rearranging the Desk Chairs: A Large Randomized Field Experiment on the Effects of Close Contact on Interethnic Relations
Contact theory predicts that interethnic exposure reduces antiminority discrimination. By contrast, conflict theory predicts that interethnic exposure worsens discrimination. Received scope conditions, however, are vague and do not properly differentiate between the domains of the theories. Furthermore, prior evidence is mostly correlational, and supportive field experiments for contact theory have largely accrued in rarefied settings. This begs …
The Future Strikes Back: Using Future Treatments to Detect and Reduce Hidden Bias
Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved confounder that affects treatment also affects the future value of the treatment. Future treatments thus p…
Preliminary evidence regarding the hypothesis that the sex ratio at sexual maturity may affect longevity in men
In human populations, variation in mate availability has been linked to various biological and social outcomes, but the possible effect of mate availability on health or survival has not been studied. Unbalanced sex ratios are a concern in many parts of the world, and their implications for the health and survival of the constituent individuals warrant careful investigation. We indexed mate availability with contextual sex ratios and investigated…
Feasible Peer Effects: Experimental Evidence for Deskmate Effects on Educational Achievement and Inequality
Schools routinely employ seating charts to influence educational outcomes. Dependable \nevidence for the causal effects of seating charts on students’ achievement levels and inequality, \nhowever, is scarce. We executed a large pre-registered field experiment to estimate causal peer \neffects on students’ test scores and grades by randomizing the seating charts of 195 classrooms \n(N=3,365 students). We found that neither sitting next to a deskma…
Peer effects on academic self-concept: A Large Randomized Field Experiment
Social theories posit that peers affect students' academic self-concept (ASC). Most prominently, Big-Fish-Little-Pond, invidious comparison, and relative deprivation theories predict that exposure to academically stronger peers decreases students' ASC, and exposure to academically weaker peers increases students' ASC. These propositions have not yet been tested experimentally. We executed a large and pre-registered field experiment that randomize…
Widowhood and Race
The health effects of marital status are frequently cited in the current debate on marriage promotion, but little is known about how marital health effects vary across groups. This article assembles the largest properly longitudinal and nationally representative dataset of elderly married couples in the United States (N = 410,272 couples) and provides strong evidence that the "widowhood effect"-how the death of a spouse increases the mortality of…
The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses
Objectives. We investigated the effect of spousal bereavement on mortality to document cause-specific bereavement effects by the causes of death of both the predecedent spouse and the bereaved partner. Methods. We obtained data from a nationally representative cohort of 373 189 elderly married couples in the United States who were followed from 1993 to 2002. We used competing risk and Cox models in our analyses. Results. For both men and women, t…
Wives and ex-wives: A new test for homogamy bias in the widowhood effect
Increased mortality following the death of a spouse (the “widowhood effect”) may be due to (1) causation, (2) bias from spousal similarity (homogamy), or (3) bias from shared environmental exposures. This article proposes new tests for bias in the widowhood effect by examining husbands, wives, and ex-wives in a longitudinal sample of over 1 million elderly Americans. If the death of an ex-wife has no causal effect on the mortality of her husband,…
Widowhood and mortality among the elderly: The modifying role of neighborhood concentration of widowed individuals
Preliminary evidence regarding the hypothesis that the sex ratio at sexual maturity may affect longevity in men
In human populations, variation in mate availability has been linked to various biological and social outcomes, but the possible effect of mate availability on health or survival has not been studied. Unbalanced sex ratios are a concern in many parts of the world, and their implications for the health and survival of the constituent individuals warrant careful investigation. We indexed mate availability with contextual sex ratios and investigated…
Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduati…
The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability
This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on "neighborhood effects" that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the …
Graphical Causal Models
Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable
Endogenous selection bias is a central problem for causal inference. Recognizing the problem, however, can be difficult in practice. This article introduces a purely graphical way of characterizing endogenous selection bias and of understanding its consequences ( Hernán et al. 2004 ). We use causal graphs (direct acyclic graphs, or DAGs) to highlight that endogenous selection bias stems from conditioning (e.g., controlling, stratifying, or select…
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in th…
The causal interpretation of estimated associations in regression models
A common causal identification strategy in political science is selection on observables. This strategy assumes one observes a set of covariates that is, after statistical adjustment, sufficient to make treatment status as-if random. Under adjustment methods such as matching or inverse probability weighting, coefficients for control variables are treated as nuisance parameters and are not directly estimated. This is in direct contrast to regressi…
Yes, You Can! Effects of Transparent Admission Standards on High School Track Choice: A Randomized Field Experiment
High school track choice determines college access in many countries. We hypothesize that some qualified students avoid the college-bound track in high school simply because they overestimate admission requirements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a randomized field experiment that communicated the admission standards of local secondary schools on the academic track to students in Hungary before the application deadline. We targeted the sub…
The Future Strikes Back: Using Future Treatments to Detect and Reduce Hidden Bias
Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved confounder that affects treatment also affects the future value of the treatment. Future treatments thus p…
Feasible Peer Effects: Experimental Evidence for Deskmate Effects on Educational Achievement and Inequality
Schools routinely employ seating charts to influence educational outcomes. Dependable \nevidence for the causal effects of seating charts on students’ achievement levels and inequality, \nhowever, is scarce. We executed a large pre-registered field experiment to estimate causal peer \neffects on students’ test scores and grades by randomizing the seating charts of 195 classrooms \n(N=3,365 students). We found that neither sitting next to a deskma…
Spillover Effects of Prenatal Care Coordination on Older Siblings Beyond the Mother-Infant Dyad
BACKGROUND: Pregnancy care coordination increases preventive care receipt for mothers and infants. Whether such services affect other family members' health care is unknown. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the spillover effect of maternal exposure to Wisconsin Medicaid's Prenatal Care Coordination (PNCC) program during pregnancy with a younger sibling on the preventive care receipt for an older child. RESEARCH DESIGN: Gain-score regressions-a sibling fixe…
Peer effects on academic self-concept: A Large Randomized Field Experiment
Social theories posit that peers affect students' academic self-concept (ASC). Most prominently, Big-Fish-Little-Pond, invidious comparison, and relative deprivation theories predict that exposure to academically stronger peers decreases students' ASC, and exposure to academically weaker peers increases students' ASC. These propositions have not yet been tested experimentally. We executed a large and pre-registered field experiment that randomize…
Rearranging the Desk Chairs: A Large Randomized Field Experiment on the Effects of Close Contact on Interethnic Relations
Contact theory predicts that interethnic exposure reduces antiminority discrimination. By contrast, conflict theory predicts that interethnic exposure worsens discrimination. Received scope conditions, however, are vague and do not properly differentiate between the domains of the theories. Furthermore, prior evidence is mostly correlational, and supportive field experiments for contact theory have largely accrued in rarefied settings. This begs …
Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality
It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into compo…
Outcomes from Partner2Lose: A randomized controlled trial to evaluate 24-month weight loss in a partner-assisted intervention
Clinicaltrials.gov NCT03801174, January 11, 2019
Labor Market Consequences of Grandparenthood
Little is known about the labor market consequences of becoming a grandparent. We estimate grandparenthood effects on labor supply and earnings using detailed multigenerational data from Danish population registers. Results show that the consequences of grandparenthood are unequally distributed and starkly patterned. Becoming a grandparent reduces hours worked and income, especially for grandmothers, more so when the grandchild is born to a daugh…
Heterogenous causal effects: Potentials and pitfalls as illustrated with fatherhood and earnings
ObjectiveTo discuss how methods to estimate heterogenous causal effects can be applied in Family Science and to supply empirical examples using the case of fatherhood and earnings.BackgroundMany questions important to family scientists do not focus on one-size-fits-all average effects but rather on whether and how effects differ across groups. Recent methodological advances can assist this latter focus, offering new insights for theory and policy…
Psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Demography (10 works) · Mathematics (9 works) · Developmental psychology (8 works) · Economics (8 works) · Medicine (8 works) · School Choice and Performance (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Statistics (8 works)