Finding and retaining a job is one of the most challenging problems women confront after being released from prison. Given the dynamic and fluid interactions between legal and illegal work, we argue that to better identify and describe job trajectories after release, we must simultaneously consider disparities in work types and offending behavior. We leverage a unique dataset – the Reintegration, Desistance and Recidivism Among Female Inmates in Chile study– to describe patterns of employment within a cohort of 207 women during the first year after being released from prison. By considering different types of work (i.e., self-employed/employed, legitimate/under-the- table) and including offending as another type of income-generating activity, we adequately account for the intersection between work and crime in a particularly understudied population and context. Our results reveal stable heterogeneity in employment trajectories by job type across respondents but limited overlap between crime and work despite the high levels of marginalization in the job market. We discuss the role of barriers to and preferences for certain types of jobs as possible explanations for our findings.

Parental death in early childhood has been linked with adverse health and socioeconomic outcomes across the life course. Little research, however, have explored how early life contextual factors can contribute to offset the deleterious health effects caused by parental loss. In this presentation, Michael contributes by bridging ‘compensatory effect of social background’ from the literature of education inequalities to the sphere of health inequalities and early life adversity by proposing that contextual factors might mitigate impact of parental death on health. More precisely, the objective is to examine the extent to which social capital mitigates the adverse effect of parental death on survival at different stages across life-course.

Since their introduction to North American markets in 2004, electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS, or “e-cigarettes”) have rapidly grown popular. Recent data from Canada and the United States indicate about 14% of high school students actively use ENDS, and over 1 in 4 ENDS users “vape” every day. The proliferation of novel vaping devices and flavors with teen appeal has outpaced the adoption of regulations meant to curb adolescent nicotine use and prevent a return to the watermark in smoking prevalence from the 1990s. Data limitations prevent careful investigation of the contextual and geographic characteristics of e-cigarette use, and little is known about the genetic underpinnings of vaping. In this talk, Dr. Adam Lippert will share findings from an empirically-estimated dataset of nicotine use across Canadian communities and examine the community correlates of such use. He will also present results from a study evaluating the relative contributions of socioeconomic and polygenic risks to vaping among adults reaching mid-life in the United States. Opportunities for rethinking approaches to measuring local health environments will be discussed alongside policy options for ENDS regulation.