Department of Sociology | University of Maryland

Rebeca Wong
Senior Research Scientist

Associate Director, Maryland Population Research Center

Ph.D. Economics, University of Michigan, 1987

Office: 3123 Art-Sociology Building

Phone: 301 405-6395
Email: rwong@socy.umd.edu

Specialty Areas:
Gender, Work and Family; Demography, Development

Rebeca Wong is a Mexican national who received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1987, and is currently the Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Maryland Population Research Center, and faculty associate of the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland.

Wong’s research agenda deals with the economic demography of Hispanic and immigrant populations in the U.S. and in Latin America, especially Mexico. Her research focuses on two main areas: 1) migration and old-age consequences, and 2) health and aging. In these broad topics, Wong applies a cross-national perspective to study health and aging processes of the population. In a 2005 paper in Population and Development Review with Ken Hill, she uses data from Mexico and U.S. censuses to estimate the net flow of migrants from Mexico to the U.S., yielding an estimate of 400,000 net migrants per year. In the area of health and aging, she and colleagues are using this cross-national perspective to study the determinants of health among older adults in Latin America. In a 2006 special volume of the journal Health and Aging edited by Wong and colleagues, and a special volume of the Panamerican Journal of Public Health, several papers use data from different countries to conclude that regardless of context and the stage of demographic and epidemiologic transitions, the perceived quality of memory dominates the self-report of global health by older adults in Latin America. Also using a cross national perspective, in a 2006 paper in Research on Aging, Wong and former student Juan José Díaz find that health insurance plays a key role in the propensity to use health care among Mexicans in both Mexico and the U.S. However, the effect varies by type of health care service, concluding that health insurance plays a major role for the type of service for which there are no low-cost alternatives in the country, such as doctor visits in the U.S. In a forthcoming paper in International Migration Review, Wong and co-authors find that, after controlling for migration selectivity, older adults in Mexico who are former U.S. migrants have large wealth advantage over Mexicans who never left for the U.S. The paper concludes however, that the mechanisms of this wealth advantage may not be straightforward. The accumulated wealth advantage may not necessarily originate from the old adults’ own trips to the U.S.; part of the economic gain may be due to skills they acquired in the U.S. which provided them with higher earnings upon returning to Mexico, or by their children’s subsequent U.S. migration which allowed the older adults to accumulate wealth through remittances.