Population Research Discovery Seminars

Recent neighborhood effects studies have largely focused on proximate associations between childhood ecological conditions and childhood outcomes. In contrast, Steven capitalizes on restricted data from the NLSY 1979 and NLSY Child and Young Adults cohorts to study how childhood neighborhood disadvantage impacts joblessness, income, obesity, and criminal justice contact in adulthood. Sibling fixed effects and cousin fixed effects models, which address unobserved confounding at the parental and grand-parental levels, suggest that exposure to childhood neighborhood disadvantage indeed impacts adult well-being. Moreover, he analyzes whether these neighborhood effects operate through sensitive childhood years, teen socialization, duration effects, and cumulative effects across respondents’ life-course. Lastly, he explores whether familial exposure to multiple generations of neighborhood disadvantage yield pernicious effects on well-being for grandchildren

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Steven Alvarado is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. His research focuses on questions regarding inequality on various levels including race and ethnicity, education, neighborhoods, health, immigration, and criminal justice contact in the U.S. He relies on mostly restricted nationally representative longitudinal data and quantitative methods. His work has been published in Social Forces, Social Science Research, Race and Social Problems, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He received his BA in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In addition, he has been a fellow of the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education.

Steven has some availability on Friday morning; please contact him directly at alvarado@cornell.edu if you would like to speak with him.