CPRC

Past research: Lu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She has published in the areas of social stratification and social demography. Her past work examines educational stratification in the context of societal changes and cultural diversity. She studies family composition and educational attainment in China and finds the important role of political environments in shaping educational resource allocation within families. In a study on a similar topic in South Africa, she shows the mediating effect of cultural customs and values of childbearing in the educational stratification process. She has also been interested in examining the causes and consequences of migration in a variety of settings. Her past work includes studies of the educational status of migrant children in China, with an emphasis on differential institutional arrangements across regions, and the impact of parental migration and remittances on schooling of children left behind in South Africa.

Present and future research: Part of her current research links migration with health to understand the interrelationships between the two processes. Specifically, she examines health at each stage of the migration process, from the decision to move, to the adjustment at destination and return to the origin. One of her recently completed projects finds support for the longstanding presumption in the migration literature, "the healthy migrant effect". Other recent work includes studies of the health status of migrants and of people left behind by migrants in several developing settings, and the underlying socioeconomic, psychosocial, and behavioral mechanisms. She has also been working on a national survey project on migration and health in China and recently completed data collection for the first wave. Extending these lines of research, her future work will examine the consequences of migration for adult and child well-being across a number of developing settings in a comparative perspective, and the role of state institutions, marketization, and social capital in conditioning labor market outcomes of internal migrants in China.

Professor Lu's Personal Biography Page