Nicholas D.E. Mark

Fellow #demographers - coming to #PAA2026 ? 🤓

💫 Please save the date for the Feminist Demography Pre-Conference Workshop!

Wednesday 5/6/2026
9-5pm CST in-person at PAA!

Flash talks! A moderated panel discussion! And a social hour to connect with fellow feminist demography colleagues!

I am excited to be hiring two post-doctoral positions at UCLA--please share with your networks. www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.....

Women’s college attendance delivers wage and job-quality gains that grow over the life cycle, alongside improvements in children’s early-life health, from Na'ama Shenhav and Danielle H. Sandler www.nber.org/papers/w34767

Interesting! That on its own seems notable given the fertility education connection in other work. thanks!

Great paper! Thanks for posting! Did you happen to test effects on fertility rates as well?

Life-Cycle Effects of Women's Education on their Careers and Children Increased women’s college attendance delivers wage and job-quality gains that grow over the life cycle, alongside improvements in children’s early-life health.

New Census Working Paper: "Life-Cycle Effects of Women's Education on their Careers and Children" by Na'ama Shenhav and Danielle H. Sandler
www.census.gov/library/work...

New NIH common forms do this too!

Assessing Statistical Analysis Practices in Utilizing Data From the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System 2015 to 2019 to Analyze Selected Health Outcomes of Sexual Minority Youth: A Systematic Review and Cross‐Sectional Analysis Introduction This study critically evaluates the statistical methodologies employed in analyzing Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) data from 2015 to 2019, specifically focusing on healt...

Weighted vs. unweighted analyses matter: ignoring survey design leads to biased estimates of health disparities among SMY. Inconsistent methods and software also weaken comparability. Follow weighting guidelines to ensure valid, reliable results. #SOGIData

Federal immigration enforcement near schools disrupts attendance, traumatizes students and damages their academic performance While federal immigrant agents need to produce a judicial warrant to enter a classroom, they can freely operate in public spaces at and around schools.

Great insights by @csattinbajaj.bsky.social on how schools can support immigrant students, parents, and the teachers who care about them.

Poster showing speakers for the TPN seminar series

The Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social Seminar Series is happening this semester, with a great line-up, including @lucampesando.bsky.social, Orsola Torrisi, @mdhayward.bsky.social, and @jnobles.bsky.social! Starts next Tuesday. If you're in Toronto please come along!

Current weather in Toronto: about to receive snowfall of great research 🌨️🤓

Markets and Mobility: How Employers Structure Economic Opportunity

Intergenerational mobility, measuring the ability to achieve economic success regardless of family background, is a critical reflection of a society’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Rising income inequality has raised concerns about the potential erosion of upward mobility. While education has traditionally been viewed as the path to mobility, its transformative power is facing challenges in a rapidly evolving job market. This project reorients the focus of intergenerational mobility research by highlighting the labor market as an arena for the reproduction of advantage. It employs a comparative approach, using administrative data from four countries: Sweden, Austria, England, and the United States. It also incorporates evidence from a broader set of nations through cross-national surveys, longitudinal household surveys, labor force surveys, secondary data, and digital trace data. The project employs cutting-edge empirical methods, including quasi- experimental designs, event studies, within-family comparisons, decomposition analyses, counterfactual simulations, and diagnostic checks to rigorously assess the extent of inequalities in the labor market. The research investigates how family background influences the sorting of individuals to employers and workplaces, accounting for education and occupation, and explores variations in career progression within and between employers. It comprehensively catalogues and assesses mechanisms shaping workplace inequality, contributing to the development of social closure theory. Additionally, the project evaluates intervention strategies, encompassing both employer practices and government actions, to promote fair opportunity in the labor market.

JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project.

Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months.

Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.

Cool new paper by colleagues @hsph.harvard.edu on school districts as proxies for neighborhood. District boundaries are underutilized in #pophealth research, limiting our ability to understand health impacts of school exposures. doi.org/10.1016/j.ss... @iaphs.bsky.social @capolicylab.bsky.social 1/

Screen shot that reads Journal Article Editor's Choice When Information is Not Enough: Evidence from a Centralised School Choice System Free Kehinde F Ajayi , Willa H Friedman , Adrienne M Lucas The Economic Journal, Volume 136, Issue 673, January 2026, Pages 26–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaf046 Published: 13 June 2025 Article history Abstract We implemented a large-scale randomised controlled trial encompassing 900 junior high schools in Ghana, a country with universal secondary school choice, to study whether providing students and parents with information on school characteristics and selection strategies improved outcomes in a centralised school selection mechanism. Information changed households’ preferences and the characteristics of schools to which they applied. Students gained admission to higher value-added schools, yet they were not more likely to matriculate on time or at all. Incomplete school information was not the only friction. Household shocks and inaccurate preference forecasting likely contributed to continued admission deviations.

Thrilled that "When Information is Not Enough: Evidence from a Centralised School Choice System" with @willafriedman.bsky.social and #KehindeAjayi is in the January 2026 #EconomicJournal.

It's an "Editor's Choice," FREE to download, and easy to cite. :) academic.oup.com/ej/article/1...

Great news! @govevers.wisconsin.gov is launching Wisconsin’s first public child care program for four-year-olds, helping kids get ready for their first year of school.

The cost of childcare is too damn high and I applaud the Governor for addressing this.

Haha it’s certainly gotten less common for me to see since I moved to Madison! Still happens here though - at bars and sports fields mostly is my experience. I was in nyc and New Orleans before that. NYC is not very violent per capita and felt very safe, you just see a lot of people!

and no memories of stepping over bloody doorsteps to get into the club! (Not that I spent a lot of time going to the club though…)

Yeah not like every week but enough that they don’t stick out. Also not generally super damaging, blood is pretty rare and theyre usually broken up

from a us perspective, I see fights all the time (though admittedly not over soccer). Routine violence alive and well. Though the temporal trends are definitely the same.

Thanks Michael!

Can speed cameras make streets safer? Quasi-experimental evidence from New York City | PNAS Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions in the United States, generating $340 billion in economic costs. To make roads saf...

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Between 1979–2019, top pay (90th pct.) climbed 53%, middle only 23%, bottom (10th pct.) even lower 7%. (Productivity per hour climbed much more at 73%.)

But since 2019, fast gains at the bottom have already reversed about 1/3 of the rise in pay inequality.

A 🧵 about my book: The Wage Standard.

Excellent new work on the ways that harsh immigration policy affects kids. In a paper last year colleagues and I found evidence for the specific mechanism Tom hypothesizes: fear. This makes me so sad for our kids. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The state of the pronatalist movement The pronatalist movement, which claims to be rectifying what some of its members describe as the likely collapse of civilization due to population decline.

I spoke w/ @npr.org's Here & Now about pronatalism. The conversation about low birth rates is really about creating a moral panic. Once folks are convinced that low rates cause major problems that can *only* be addressed through raising rates, it opens to door to all sorts of regressive policies.

I’m personally thrilled about this because I’m teaching abt data transformation and regression tomorrow and this is just perfect

Three future PAA presidents (Taeuber, Taeuber, Whelpton) and one ASA president (Hankins) wrote positive pieces in American Journal of Sociology in the 1930s about Hitler's pronatalist policies.
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If you’re attending SFP come to my book event tomorrow with Asha Hassan! @reproresearcher.bsky.social

Att fà barn efter 40 - en nygammal trend? Fruktsamhetstal för kvinnor 40-44 är och 45-49 ar, 1751-2024 Antal födda barn per 1 000 kvinnor 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 ... 1750 1800 1850 ・・・ 1900 - 40-44 ăr —45-49 ăr — Ảr 1950 2000

Sweden, the place with the best historical data, finds that a larger percentage of births in the late 1800s (12%) were by mothers over age 40 than today (5%). I extremely did not know this

www.scb.se/hitta-statis...

Yes! I teach this in my undergrad populations class! And it’s not just Sweden - we actually have good data on a few historical populations and having kids after age 40 was extremely common

Title: A Justification for 80% Power Abstract: Cohen’s heuristic reason for choosing 80% power (balancing Type I and TypeII errors) conveniently arrives at approximately the same number as an approachwhere one maximizes the marginal gain in power per standard error reduction. Ihave yet to see someone point this out, and this is interesting because it providesa non-arbitrary justification for 80% power.

a derivation of the result

I think this is kind of neat and I don't think anyone else has noticed it (I've looked and I can't find anyone who has) osf.io/preprints/so...

Maybe I should back off "justification" language, but it's at least a remarkable coincidence. I still think someone else *must* have noticed it...