Alumni Association

Nuria Rodriguez-Planas The effect of school peers on intimate partner violence: Evidence from peers’ genetic predisposition to alcohol consumption Using quasi-random variation in peer composition across grades within schools and genetic measures from the Add Health study, we analyze how high school peers’ genetic predisposition to alcohol consumption impacts women’s risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization in early adulthood. We find that a one standard deviation increase in peers’ average genetic predisposition to alcohol consumption raises females’ probability of being victimized by their partner by 4.5 percentage points, about three-fifths of the size (in absolute value) of the effect induced by a one standard deviation increase in parental socio-economic status. This effect operates primarily through social network formation. While exposure to peers with a high genetic predisposition to alcohol use does not influence the victims’ own drinking or risk-taking behaviors, it increases their likelihood of forming friendships with other females who binge drink. Notably, the influence of high school peer exposure on victimization diminishes by later adulthood. These findings illuminate how peer environments in adolescence can shape vulnerability to IPV through social network formation, though the effects appear time-limited.

Join us as the 2023 Kheel Center Travel Grant winners present their research findings. The Richard Strassberg Travel Grant supports scholars conducting archival research at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives in Catherwood Library. Catherwood, located in the ILR School, is part of Cornell University Library. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from the recipients and explore their work! Program information will be sent upon registration. Speakers: Hillary Dann, producer/researcher for historical documentaries: "The Investigation of NYC Public School Teachers in the 1940s and 50s." and Hella Winston, sociologist and investigative reporterBryant Etheridge: A Program of Social Reform: The National War Labor Board, Wartime Wage Policy, and the Origins of the Great Compression, 1942-1945Daniel Goldstein: "Luigi Antonini and the Italian anti-Fascist exiles: a symbiotic relationship?"Hunter Moskowitz, Phd Candidate at Northeastern University: “Practical Men: “White Patriarchal Skill in the Global Textile Industry.”

Joseph Mullins Designing cash transfers in the presence of children's human capital formation This paper finds that accounting for the human capital development of children has a quantitatively large effect on the true costs and benefits of providing cash assistance to single mothers in the United States. A dynamic model of work, welfare participation, and parental investment in children introduces a formal apparatus for calculating costs and benefits when individuals respond to incentives. The model provides a tractable outcome equation in which a policy’s effect on child skills can be understood through its impact on two economic resources in the household – time and money – and the share of each resource as factors in the production of skills. These key causal parameters are cleanly identified by policy variation through the 1990s. The model also admits simple and interpretable formulae for optimal nonlinear transfers in the style of Mirrlees (1971), with novel features arising when child skill formation is accounted for. Using a broadly conservative empirical strategy, estimates imply that optimal transfers are about 20% more generous than the US benchmark, and shaped very differently. In contrast to current policies, the optimal policy discourages labor supply at the bottom of the income distribution due to the costly estimated impacts of work on child development. The finding underscores the importance of reconciling results in the literature on the developmental effects of maternal employment. Finally, a counterfactual model exercise suggests that changes to the welfare and tax environment after 1996 had negative average effects both on maternal welfare and child skill outcomes, with a significant degree of redistribution across latent dimensions.

2025 Milton Konvitz Lecture: Elizabeth Anderson, the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, will deliver ILR's 2025 Milton Konvitz Lecture. The public is invited to attend in person or live online. Please register if you plan to join us online. Please join us as Professor Anderson examines the contrast between profit-driven business models and the original Protestant work ethic, which emphasized fairness, community trust, and ethical labor practices. Drawing from 17th-century Puritan business principles, the lecture will explore modern challenges—such as private equity’s impact—and ways to improve professional and social services to create more fulfilling work for all. The Konvitz Lecture is made possible through the generosity of Irwin Jacobs (BEE ’56) and Joan Jacobs (BS HE ’54).

Jessie Handbury

Eric Chyn