Scholars@Duke
Duncan Thomas

Duncan Thomas

Norb F. Schaefer Distinguished Professor of International Studies in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
Economics
Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708
314 Social Sciences Bldg, Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

High-resolution imagery and neural networks link post-tsunami land cover changes to population health and well-being.

Journal article Communications earth & environment · January 2026 As extreme events intensify in force and frequency across the globe, relating the damage and subsequent reconstruction to population health and well-being remains a critical frontier. Here we build a convolutional neural network to classify landcover from ... Full text Cite

Farm profits, prices and household behavior.

Journal article Journal of development economics · May 2025 The agricultural household model, in which decisions about production and consumption are made simultaneously, lies at the heart of many models of development. Empirically modelling these simultaneous choices is not straightforward. The vast majority of em ... Full text Cite

Education and Adult Cognition in a Low-Income Setting: Differences among Adult Siblings.

Journal article Journal of human capital · January 2025 The relationship between completed education and adult cognition is investigated using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. We compare adult siblings to account for shared, difficult-to-measure characteristics that likely affect this relationship, i ... Full text Cite

Extreme events, educational aspirations, and long-term outcomes.

Journal article Population and environment · January 2024 The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was an extremely destructive event in Aceh, Indonesia, killing over 160,000 people and destroying infrastructure, homes, and livelihoods over miles of coastline. In its immediate aftermath, affected populations faced a dauntin ... Full text Cite

Exposure to the Indian Ocean Tsunami shapes the HPA-axis resulting in HPA "burnout" 14 years later.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2023 Despite significant research on the effects of stress on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, questions remain regarding long-term impacts of large-scale stressors. Leveraging data on exposure to an unanticipated major natural disaster, the 2004 ... Full text Cite

Evolution of Risk Aversion over Five Years after a Major Natural Disaster.

Journal article Journal of development economics · June 2023 The impact of exposure to a major unanticipated natural disaster on the evolution of survivors' attitudes toward risk is examined, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in combination with rich population-rep ... Full text Cite

Diurnal dynamic range as index of dysregulation of system dynamics. A cortisol examplar using data from the Study of Midlife in the United States.

Journal article Psychoneuroendocrinology · August 2022 We discuss the importance of including measures of dysregulated system dynamics in the operationalization of allostatic load. The concept of allostatic load, as originally proposed by McEwen and Stellar, included dysregulation not only in the resting state ... Full text Cite

Reevaluating the Long-Term Impact of In Utero Exposure to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

Journal article The journal of political economy · July 2022 Almond (2006) argues that in utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic reduced the 1919 birth cohort's adult socioeconomic status (SES). We show that this cohort came from lower-SES families, which is incompatible with Almond's cohort-comparison identi ... Full text Cite

Effects of Housing Aid on Psychosocial Health after a Disaster.

Journal article International journal of environmental research and public health · June 2022 Little is known about whether the provision of aid in the aftermath of a large-scale natural disaster affects psychological well-being. We investigate the effects of housing assistance, a key element of the reconstruction program implemented after the 2004 ... Full text Cite

Prevalence, severity and distribution of depression and anxiety symptoms using observational data collected before and nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Journal article Lancet regional health. Americas · September 2021 BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by substantial increases in adverse mental health, particularly among the young. However, it remains unclear to what extent increases in population scores on mental health assessments are due to ... Full text Cite

Effects of a natural disaster on mortality risks over the longer term.

Journal article Nature sustainability · August 2020 Exposure to disasters and other extreme events is rising across the globe but the impact on long-term mortality risks of affected populations is not established. We examine how mortality and individual-specific traumatic exposures at the time of the disast ... Full text Cite

Decision-Making in Complex Households

Journal article · January 2020 Cite

Impact of violent crime on risk aversion: Evidence from the mexican drug war

Journal article Review of Economics and Statistics · December 1, 2019 Whereas attitudes toward risk play an important role in many decisions over the life course, factors that affect those attitudes are not fully understood. Using longitudinal survey data collected in Mexico before and during the Mexican war on drugs, we inv ... Full text Cite

HPLC-based Measurement of Glycated Hemoglobin using Dried Blood Spots Collected under Adverse Field Conditions.

Journal article Biodemography and social biology · January 2018 Glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) measured using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) assays with venous blood and dried blood spots (DBS) are compared for 143 paired samples collected in Aceh, Indonesia. Relative to gold-standard venous-blood values, D ... Full text Cite

Adult Mortality Five Years after a Natural Disaster.

Journal article Population and development review · September 2017 Exposure to extreme events has been hypothesized to affect subsequent mortality because of mortality selection and scarring effects of the event itself. We examine survival at and in the five years after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami for a p ... Full text Cite

Height and cognition at work: Labor market productivity in a low income setting.

Journal article Economics and human biology · May 2017 Taller workers earn more, particularly in lower income settings. It has been argued that adult height is a marker of strength which is rewarded in the labor market; a proxy for cognitive performance or other dimensions of human capital such as school quali ... Full text Cite

Farms, Families, and Markets: New Evidence on Completeness of Markets in Agricultural Settings.

Journal article Econometrica : journal of the Econometric Society · September 2016 The farm household model has played a central role in improving the understanding of small-scale agricultural households and non-farm enterprises. Under the assumptions that all current and future markets exist and that farmers treat all prices as given, t ... Full text Cite

Africans in the American Labor Market.

Journal article Demography · October 2015 The number of migrants to the United States from Africa has grown exponentially since the 1930s. For the first time in America's history, migrants born in Africa are growing at a faster rate than migrants from any other continent. The composition of Africa ... Full text Cite

The effects of mortality on fertility: population dynamics after a natural disaster.

Journal article Demography · February 2015 Understanding how mortality and fertility are linked is essential to the study of population dynamics. We investigate the fertility response to an unanticipated mortality shock that resulted from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed large shares of ... Full text Cite

Endogenous coresidence and program incidence: South Africa's Old Age Pension.

Journal article Journal of development economics · July 2014 We investigate whether living arrangements respond to an arguably exogenous shift in the distribution of power in family economic decision-making. In the early 1990s, the South African Old Age Pension was expanded to cover most black South Africans above a ... Full text Cite

Nighttime lights time series of tsunami damage, recovery, and economic metrics in Sumatra, Indonesia.

Journal article Remote sensing letters (Print) · January 2014 On 26 December 2004, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake off the west coast of the northern Sumatra, Indonesia resulted in 160,000 Indonesians killed. We examine the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) nighttime light ima ... Full text Cite

Studying Displacement After a Disaster Using Large Scale Survey Methods: Sumatra After the 2004 Tsunami.

Journal article Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers · January 2014 Understanding of human vulnerability to environmental change has advanced in recent years, but measuring vulnerability and interpreting mobility across many sites differentially affected by change remains a significant challenge. Drawing on longitudinal da ... Full text Cite

Effect of village midwife program on contraceptive prevalence and method choice in Indonesia.

Journal article Studies in family planning · December 2013 Indonesia established its Village Midwife Program in 1989 to combat high rates of maternal mortality. The program's goals were to address gaps in access to reproductive health care for rural women, increase access to and use of family planning services, an ... Full text Cite

Links between socio-economic circumstances and changes in smoking behavior in the Mexican population: 2002-2010.

Journal article Journal of cross-cultural gerontology · September 2013 While deleterious consequences of smoking on health have been widely publicized, in many developing countries, smoking prevalence is high and increasing. Little is known about the dynamics underlying changes in smoking behavior. This paper examines socio-e ... Full text Cite

Education, Vulnerability, and Resilience after a Natural Disaster.

Journal article Ecology and society : a journal of integrative science for resilience and sustainability · January 2013 The extent to which education provides protection in the face of a large-scale natural disaster is investigated. Using longitudinal population-representative survey data collected in two provinces on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, before and after the 2 ... Full text Cite

Fertility Regulation in an Economic Crisis.

Journal article Economic development and cultural change · October 2012 Substantial international aid is spent reducing the cost of contraception in developing countries, as part of a larger effort to reduce global fertility and increase investment per child worldwide. The importance for fertility behaviors of keeping contrace ... Full text Cite

SMOKING ONSET AND CESSATION IN MEXICO

Journal article GERONTOLOGIST · November 1, 2011 Link to item Cite

Links between childhood and adult social circumstances and obesity and hypertension in the Mexican population.

Journal article Journal of aging and health · October 2011 ObjectivesThis study examines links between early life circumstances and adult socioeconomic status and obesity and hypertension in the adult Mexican population.MethodWe use data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) collected in 20 ... Full text Cite

MORTALITY, THE FAMILY AND THE INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI.

Journal article Economic journal (London, England) · August 2011 Over 130,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The correlates of survival are examined using data from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), a population-representative survey collected in Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia, be ... Full text Cite

Global aging

Journal article · January 1, 2011 Social research on global aging is a rapidly growing field. The goal of this chapter is to highlight emerging lines of inquiry that are likely to have an important impact on science and discusses challenges that have hindered progress. The aggregate demogr ... Full text Cite

Investments, time preferences and public transfers paid to women.

Journal article Economic development and cultural change · April 2009 The literature suggests men and women may have different preferences. This paper exploits a social experiment in which women in treatment households were given a large public cash transfer (PROGRESA). In an effort to disentangle the effect of additional in ... Full text Cite

Psychological Health Before, During, and After an Economic Crisis: Results from Indonesia, 1993 - 2000.

Journal article The World Bank economic review · January 2009 The 1997 Indonesian financial crisis resulted in severe economic dislocation and political upheaval, and the detrimental consequences for economic welfare, physical health, and child education have been established in several studies. The crisis also adver ... Full text Cite

Mental health in Sumatra after the tsunami.

Journal article American journal of public health · September 2008 ObjectivesWe assessed the levels and correlates of posttraumatic stress reactivity (PTSR) of more than 20,000 adult tsunami survivors by analyzing survey data from coastal Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia.MethodsA population-representati ... Full text Cite

Nutritional status during an economic crisis: Evidence from Russia

Journal article Economic Journal · August 29, 2008 Between 1996 and 1998, Russia experienced a spectacular decline in economic activity which was followed by a dramatic rebound between 1998 and 2000. We use panel data to examine the impact of variation in household resources on six dimensions of nutritiona ... Full text Cite

The healthy migrant effect: new findings from the Mexican Family Life Survey.

Journal article American journal of public health · January 2008 ObjectivesWe used nationally representative longitudinal data from the Mexican Family Life Survey to determine whether recent migrants from Mexico to the United States are healthier than other Mexicans. Previous research has provided little scient ... Full text Cite

Assessment and Prediction of Natural Hazards from Satellite Imagery.

Journal article Progress in physical geography · October 2007 Since 2000, there have been a number of spaceborne satellites that have changed the way we assess and predict natural hazards. These satellites are able to quantify physical geographic phenomena associated with the movements of the earth's surface (earthqu ... Full text Cite

Explaining Family Change and Variation: Challenges for Family Demographers.

Journal article Journal of marriage and the family · November 2005 Twenty years ago, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) issued a request for proposals that resulted in the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), a unique survey valuable to a wide range of family scholars. This ... Full text Cite

Can expanding access to basic healthcare improve children's health status? Lessons from Indonesia's 'midwife in the village' programme.

Journal article Population studies · March 2005 In the 1990s, the Indonesian government placed over 50,000 midwives in communities throughout the country. We examine how this expansion in health services affected children's height-for-age. To address the problem that midwives were not randomly allocated ... Full text Cite

Health consequences of forest fires in Indonesia.

Journal article Demography · February 2005 We combined data from a population-based longitudinal survey with satellite measures of aerosol levels to assess the impact of smoke from forest fires that blanketed the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra in late 1997 on adult health. To account ... Full text Cite

Education in a crisis

Journal article Journal of Development Economics · June 1, 2004 The year 1998 saw the onset of a major economic and financial crisis in Indonesia. GDP fell by 12% that year. The effect on education of the next generation is examined. On average, household spending on education declined, most dramatically among the poor ... Full text Cite

Remembrances of things past: Test-retest reliability of retrospective migration histories

Journal article Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A Statistics in Society · December 1, 2003 Matched retrospective life history data collected from the same individuals in two waves of the Malaysian Family Life Survey provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the quality of long-term recall data in a rapidly changing developing country. Recall qual ... Full text Cite

Economic shocks, wealth, and welfare

Journal article Journal of Human Resources · January 1, 2003 The immediate effects of the Asian crisis on the well-being of Indonesians are examined using the Indonesia Family Life Survey, an ongoing longitudinal household survey. There is tremendous diversity in the effect of the shock: For some households, it was ... Full text Cite

Longer-term effects of head start

Journal article American Economic Review · September 1, 2002 Specially collected data on adults in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer-term effects of Head Start, an early intervention program for poor preschool-age children. Whites who attended Head Start are, relative to t ... Full text Open Access Cite

Health, nutrition and prosperity: a microeconomic perspective.

Journal article Bulletin of the World Health Organization · January 2002 A positive correlation between health and economic prosperity has been widely documented, but the extent to which this reflects a causal effect of health on economic outcomes is very controversial. Two classes of evidence are examined. First, carefully des ... Cite

Wages, employment and economic shocks: Evidence from Indonesia

Journal article Journal of Population Economics · January 1, 2002 After over a quarter century of sustained economic growth, Indonesia was struck by a large and unanticipated crisis at the end of the 20th Century. Real GDP declined by about 12% in 1998. Using 13 years of annual labor force data in conjunction with two wa ... Full text Cite

Bargaining power within couples and use of prenatal and delivery care in Indonesia.

Journal article Studies in family planning · June 2001 Indonesian women's power relative to that of their husbands is examined to determine how it affects use of prenatal and delivery care. Holding household resources constant, a woman's control over economic resources affects the couple's decision-making. Com ... Full text Cite

Women's health and pregnancy outcomes: do services make a difference?

Journal article Demography · May 2001 We use data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey to investigate the impact of a major expansion in access to midwifery services on health and pregnancy outcomes for women of reproductive age. Between 1990 and 1998 Indonesia trained some 50,000 midwives. B ... Full text Cite

Lost but not forgetten: Attrition and follow-up in the Indonesia family life survey

Journal article Journal of Human Resources · January 1, 2001 Data from three waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) are used to examine follow-up and attrition in the context of a large scale panel survey conducted in a low-income setting. Household-level attrition between the baseline and first follow-up ... Full text Cite

Early test scores, school quality and SES: Longrun effects on wage and employment outcomes

Journal article Research in Labor Economics · January 1, 2001 This study uses data from the British National Child Development Survey (NCDS) to examine interactions between socio-economic status (SES), children's test scores, and future wages and employment. We find that children of lower SES have both lower age 16 t ... Full text Cite

The measurement and interpretation of health in social surveys

Journal article · 2000 Health status is hard to measure. It is widely recognized that health is multi-dimensional reflecting the combination of an array of factors that include physical, mental and social well-being, genotype and phenotype influences as well as expectations and ... Open Access Cite

Does Head Start help hispanic children?

Journal article Journal of Public Economics · January 1, 1999 Poor educational attainment is a persistent problem among US hispanic children, relative to non-hispanics. Many of these children are immigrants and/or come from households that use a minority language in the home. This paper examines the effects of partic ... Full text Cite

The intergenerational transmission of "intelligence": Down the slippery slopes of The Bell Curve

Journal article Industrial Relations · January 1, 1999 Herrnstein and Murray report that conditional on maternal "intelligence" (AFQT scores), child test scores are little affected by variations in socioeconomic status. Using the same data, we demonstrate that their finding is very fragile. We explore the effe ... Full text Cite

Health, Nutrition, and Economic Development

Journal article Journal of Economic Literature · June 1, 1998 Cite

On the road. Marriage and mobility in Malaysia

Journal article Journal of Human Resources · January 1, 1998 Migration choices of husbands and wives in a dynamic and developing country are studied in the context of an economic model of the household. Data are drawn from the second wave of the Malaysia Family Life Survey. Exploiting the retrospective histories, we ... Full text Cite

Health and wages: evidence on men and women in urban Brazil.

Journal article Journal of econometrics · January 1997 Full text Cite

Quality of health care, survival and health outcomes in Ghana.

Journal article Journal of health economics · June 1996 This paper analyzes the effect of quality and accessibility of health services and other public infrastructure on the health of children in Ghana. We focus on child survival, child height and weight using data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey. The re ... Full text Cite

Measurement and Mismeasurement of Social Indicators

Journal article American Economic Review · May 1, 1996 Cite

Education Across Generations in South Africa

Journal article American Economic Review · May 1, 1996 Cite

Public policy and anthropometric outcomes in the Côte d'Ivoire

Journal article Journal of Public Economics · January 1, 1996 Household survey data from the Côte d'Ivoire are used to examine the impact of public policies on child height, child weight for height and adult body mass index. Economic adjustment programs in the 1980s were accompanied by reduced availability and qualit ... Full text Cite

Fertility, contraceptive choice, and public policy in Zimbabwe

Journal article World Bank Economic Review · January 1, 1996 Zimbabwe has invested massively in public infrastructure since independence in 1980. The impact of these investments on demographic outcomes is examined using household survey data matched with two community level surveys. A woman's education is a powerful ... Full text Cite

The impact of the quality of health care on children's nutrition and survival in Ghana

Journal article World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper · January 1, 1995 The authors use objectively measured anthropometric outcomes, which reflect the nutritional status of an individual, as health indicators, focusing on child height (by age and sex) and weight (by height). Also analyzes the determinants of the probability o ... Cite

Contraceptive choice, fertility, and public policy in Zimbabwe

Journal article World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper · January 1, 1995 The determinants of contraceptive use in Zimbabwe are examined using individual-level survey data in conjunction with two special community surveys. The spotlight is focused on the role of the availability and quality of community health and family plannin ... Full text Cite

Medical care for children: public insurance, private insurance, and racial differences in utilization

Journal article Journal of Human Resources · January 1, 1995 Data from two waves of the Child-Mother module of the US National Longitudinal Surveys are used to examine the medical care received by children. The authors compare those covered by Medicaid, by private health insurance and those with no insurance coverag ... Full text Cite

The demographic transition in southern Africa: reviewing the evidence from Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Journal article Demography · May 1994 Part, but not all, of the observed decline in the number of children ever born reported in the 1984 CPS and the 1988 DHS in Botswana and Zimbabwe can be attributed to differences in sample composition: women in the 1988 survey appear to be better educated ... Full text Cite

How fast is fertility declining in Botswana and Zimbabwe?

Journal article World Bank Discussion Papers · January 1, 1994 Botswana and Zimbabwe have been acclaimed as being on the vanguard of the demographic transition in sub-Saharan Africa. Key data that are cited to support this claim are the Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys (CPS) and Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) which ... Cite

Like father, like son; like mother, like daughter: parental resources and child height

Journal article Journal of Human Resources · January 1, 1994 Using household survey data from the United States, Brazil, and Ghana, examines the relationship between parental education and child height, an indicator of health and nutritional status. In all three countries, the education of the mother has a bigger ef ... Full text Cite

Prices, infrastructure, household characteristics and child height.

Journal article Journal of development economics · October 1992 Full text Cite

Gender differences in household resource allocations

Journal article World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper · January 1, 1991 Using household survey data from the United States, Brazil and Ghana, examines the relationship between parental education and child height, an indicator of health and nutritional status. In all three countries, the education of the mother has a bigger eff ... Cite

Role of education and extension in the adoption of technology: A study of upland rice and soybean farmers in Central-West Brazil

Journal article Agricultural Economics · January 1, 1991 This paper explores reduced form determinants of the adoption of certain technologies by upland rice and soybean farmers in the Center-West region of Brazil. We merge community level data on the availability and quality of publicly provided infrastructure, ... Full text Cite

Child survival, height for age and household characteristics in Brazil.

Journal article Journal of development economics · October 1990 "The impact of household characteristics on child survival and height, conditional on age, is examined using household survey data from Brazil. Parental education is found to have a very strong positive effect on both outcomes and this is robust to the in ... Full text Cite