Retirement Makes You Old? Causal Effect of Retirement on Biological Age.

Retirement is a critical life event for older people. Health scholars have scrutinized the health effects of retirement, but its consequences on age-related diseases and mortality are unclear. We extend this body of research by integrating measurements of biological age, representing the physiological decline preceding disease onset.

Separating Scarring Effect and Selection of Early-Life Exposures With Genetic Data.

Causal life course research examining consequences of early-life exposures has largely relied on associations between early-life environments and later-life outcomes using exogenous environmental shocks. Nonetheless, even with (quasi-)randomized early-life exposures, these associations may reflect not only causation ("scarring") but also selection (i.e.

The Big (Genetic) Sort? A Research Note on Migration Patterns and Their Genetic Imprint in the United Kingdom.

This research note reinvestigates Abdellaoui et al.'s (2019) findings that genetically selective migration may lead to persistent and accumulating socioeconomic and health inequalities between types (coal mining or non-coal mining) of places in the United Kingdom. Their migration measure classified migrants who moved to the same type of place (coal mining to coal mining or non-coal mining to non-coal mining) into "stay" categories, preventing them from distinguishing migrants from nonmigrants.

Detecting genetic heterogeneities in response to trauma: The case of 9/11.

The current study evaluates genetic heterogeneities in response to trauma among U.S. young adults.

The Long Shadow: Early-Life Adversity and Later-Life Loneliness in the United States.

Objectives: This study assesses how early-life adversity (ELA) is associated with later-life loneliness among those aged 55 and older in the United States. We consider multiple domains of ELA to understand domain-specific associations between ELA and later-life loneliness.

Methods: Using data from the 2008 to 2016 rounds of Health and Retirement Study (n = 29,661 person-waves [weighted]), we evaluate whether and how different domains of ELA are associated with loneliness, and how their relationships are explained through adulthood conditions and are dependent on educational attainment.

Early life environments and cognition in adulthood: New evidence using a semiparametric approach and quantile regression.

Theories and empirical evidence document the importance of early life environmental factors on later life cognition. A next question is how and in what dimension associations between early life environments and later life cognition vary. Using data from the UK Biobank in conjunction with time-place-specific infant mortality rates, we assessed heterogeneous and non-linear associations between early life conditions and later life cognition.

Living Arrangements, Intergenerational Support, and Married Women's Subjective Well-Being.

Theory suggests that relationships between intergenerational coresidence and married women's subjective well-being may be either positive or negative. We extend previous research on this question in two ways: by focusing also on geographical proximity to parents(-in-law) and by examining differences in married women's well-being both between and within different types of living arrangements. Using data from a nationally representative survey of adults in Japan, we found no differences in married women's subjective well-being between living arrangements, but observed significant differences within living arrangements depending on married women's position in the household and the direction of intergenerational support transfers.

GWAS on birth year infant mortality rates provides evidence of recent natural selection.

Following more than a century of phenotypic measurement of natural selection processes, much recent work explores relationships between molecular genetic measurements and realized fitness in the next generation. We take an innovative approach to the study of contemporary selective pressure by examining which genetic variants are “sustained” in populations as mortality exposure increases. Specifically, we deploy a so-called “regional GWAS” (genome-wide association study) that links the infant mortality rate (IMR) by place and year in the United Kingdom with common genetic variants among birth cohorts in the UK Biobank.