Felix Elwert

Assistant Professor of Sociology
4325 Sewell Social Sciences
(608) 262-9510
Fax: (608) 262-8400
felwert@ssc.wisc.edu

Office Hours: T 11-12, W 1:30-2:30 (Fall'09)

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interest Statement
Felix Elwert’s research focuses on the social demography of marriage, mortality, and statistical methods of causal inference for the social sciences. Elwert has recently completed work on interpersonal health effects, marital status and mortality, race and spatial differences in hospice use, intergenerational effects of social context, and causal inference from observational data. He has developed a new test for unobserved heterogeneity in the apparent effect of widowhood on mortality, which uses information on current and former spouses to identify the causal effect of marital status. The test exploits the selective presence and absence of social ties to understand the social transmission of mortality, and can be translated to different substantive areas of social demography.

Selected Publications:
Elwert, Felix, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2008. “Wives and Ex-Wives: A New Test for Homogamy Bias in the Widowhood Effect.” Demography 45(4).

Elwert, Felix, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2008. “Variation in the Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses.” American Journal of Public Health 98(11):2092-98.

Elwert, Felix, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2006. “Widowhood and Race.” American Sociological Review. 71(1):16-41. [With ASR online supplement]

Funded Research Projects

Neighborhood Effects on Health in the Framingham Heart Study and the Role of Social Networks

CDE Research Theme Working Groups
Demography of Inequality
Health and Mortality
Data and Methodology