"The Role of Parental Wealth & Income in Financing Children's College Attendance & Its Consequences"

Abstract: This paper examines the influence of parental wealth and income on their children's college attendance and parents' financial support for it and whether the latter affects the subsequent levels of indebtedness of parents and their children. We use data from the PSID, especially data in the 2013 Rosters and Transfers Module on the incidence and amounts of parents' financial support for their children's college. To instrument for the potential endogeneity of parental housing wealth and income on these decisions, we use changes in parents' local housing and labor market conditions. We find that increases in both parents' housing wealth and income increase the likelihood of their children attending college through the effect of parents' financial support. This parental financing of college leads to parents carrying more debt, but their children having no greater student loan debt after graduation. We also find that parental financing of their child's college education significantly increases the probability that the child actually graduates from college.

The Trouble with Pink and Blue, Gender expression, stigma, and health among U.S. children and adolescents

Abstract: Dr. Gordon will offer a conceptual model for understanding gender expression and health and illustrate this model with examples from recent research on gender nonconformity, school-based violence and bullying, and selected health outcomes in samples of U.S. high school students and young adults.

FP3.0: Increasing the uptake of Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARCs) among adolescent females and young women in Cameroon

In sub-Saharan Africa, 25% of teenagers have started childbearing (ICF, 2015). While young women describe many of these births as planned and intentional, women under the age of 20 also have the greatest percentage of mistimed/unintended pregnancies compared to all other age groups. For example, in Cameroon, more than 30% of the births to this group were unwanted or wanted later (DHS 2011). Low age at first birth has a significant impact on the spacing of births and timing of future pregnancies. It may also reduce accumulation of human capital for both the mother and the child.

Co-sponsored with the UCLA Luskin Senior Fellows Speaker Series 

Social Science in the Age of Genomics

The cost of genetic information has been dropping at a rate faster than that of Moore's law in microcomputing.  As a result, the science of genetic prediction has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, and with it has emerged a novel field: sociogenomics.  Sociogenomics seeks to integrate genetic and environmental information to obtain a more robust, complete picture of the causes of human behavior.  This talk will highlight some recent examples of sociogenomic research, touching upon issues such as adolescent peer effects, racial discrimination, assortative mating, and fertility patterns.  The talk will conclude by discussing the social and policy implications of genetic prediction.   

Co-sponsored with the Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar Series 

Making Sense of Sensitivity: Extending Omitted Variable Bias

We extend the omitted variable bias framework with a suite of tools for sensitivity analysis in regression models that: (i) does not require assumptions about the treatment assignment nor the nature of confounders; (ii) naturally handles multiple confounders, possibly acting non-linearly; (iii) exploits expert knowledge to bound sensitivity parameters; and, (iv) can be easily computed using only standard regression results. In particular, we introduce two novel sensitivity measures suited for routine reporting. The robustness value describes the minimum strength of association unobserved confounding would need to have, both with the treatment and the outcome, to change the research conclusions. The partial R2 of the treatment with the outcome shows how strongly confounders explaining all the residual outcome variation would have to be associated with the treatment to eliminate the estimated effect. Next, we offer graphical tools for elaborating on problematic confounders, examining the sensitivity of point estimates, t-values, as well as “extreme scenarios”. Finally, we describe problems with a common “benchmarking” practice and introduce a novel procedure to instead formally bound the strength of confounders based on comparison to observed covariates. We apply these methods to a running example that estimates the effect of exposure to violence on attitudes toward peace.

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion

An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous technical advance raise the possibility of limited or even perverse impact. We study a natural policy experiment: the exclusion of almost half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States to improve farm labor market conditions. With novel labor market data we measure state-level exposure to exclusion and model the absent changes in technology or crop mix. We fail to reject zero labor market impact, inconsistent with this model.

Co-sponsored with the Public Policy and Applied Social Sciences Seminar 

Abortion utilization in Ohio’s changing legislative context

Changes in Ohio, most notably legislation and policy changes since 2011, likely have impacted women’s access to abortion. Many abortion clinics in Ohio have closed in the past seven years, and several others are currently engaged in litigation and are at risk of closure. Clinic closures influence the distance that women travel when seeking abortion. Coupled with the impact of an Ohio law that mandates a 24-hour waiting period after a woman’s initial abortion consultation, loss of a nearby clinic may put abortion out of reach for many women. Other legislation limits where abortions can and cannot be performed and to what gestational stage abortions are performed. This presentation will provide preliminary findings about population-level shifts in abortion utilization, with special attention to change over time, geographic variation, and groups of women who may be underserved.

Co-sponsored with The Bixby Center

Measuring Reproductive Autonomy: Are the questions different for Adolescents and Young Adults?

Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH will discuss her previous work developing the Reproductive Autonomy Scale, which has been mainly used among adults. Her current work focuses on understanding reproductive empowerment among young people, and the development of a new psychometric measure of Sexual Health and Reproductive Empowerment for Young Adults (The SHREYA Scale).

Co-sponsored with The Bixby Center 

Neural mechanisms lie behind the emergence of dyadic affective reciprocity and transitive closure in human groups

This talk considers a set of findings from socializing cognitive social neuroscience that captures neural and social network data at multiple time points for a group of students who volunteered to organize workers in very difficult social situations on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, in the Summer of Respect project. We identify a neural mechanism for the emergence of affective reciprocity, the building block of social solidarity. We show that we can predict from neural signatures who group members will like five months in the future. We extend this work to a discussion of transitivity, or balance. Time permitting, we discuss how a neural signature of self-enhancement (narcissism) predicts becoming peripheral in small groups, supporting the idea that there is "no I in team".

Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department

The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Family Dynamics in Europe

Although men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. In this talk, I will discuss the main results of a major research project that aimed to investigate the implications of the reversal of the gender gap in advanced education for family life across European countries. I highlight the results about union formation and assortative mating, discuss our findings about union stability as well as about husbands’ and wives’ relative earnings. Finally, I present some first results from research about implications for fertility behavior. To conclude, I will reflect on implications for conventional theories used in family sociology and demography.

Individual and Neighborhood Vulnerability over the Latin American Immigrant Health Experience

The state of Latino health seemingly defies the way in which the historical disadvantages faced by people of color in the United States get under the skin, and how place matters in reflecting or further reproducing these disparities. Hispanics –especially foreign-born individuals with lower socioeconomic statuses– have more favorable health than other race/ethnic groups –notably, U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites– in a limited but very important set of health outcomes such as cardiovascular function, some cancers and mortality across much of the life course.

In this talk, I discuss the mechanisms/phenomena driving the Hispanic immigrant health advantage, which is likely tied to processes of self-selection as well as to protection and resilience likely operating particularly well in heavily-concentrated Latino neighborhoods and enclaves. Throughout, I present my empirical research aimed at disentangling self-selection processes from the protection that immigrants might draw from fellow neighborhood and/or community members. I further discuss these findings in the context of how immigrants adapt in the longer term: these advantages and resilience eventually erode as immigrants spend more time in the United States –as well as across immigrant generations– through a series of processes by which immigrant and Latino vulnerability become somatized.

I conclude by speculating on the likely future of Latino and immigrant health, discussing how the resilience and vulnerability of Latino immigrants might evolve given recent major shifts U.S. immigration and social policies and practices, and due to important changes in the dynamics of migration between Mesoamerica and the United States.

Immigrants’ Economic Assimilation: Evidence from Matched Administrative Records

Immigrants’ ability to succeed in the labor market and achieve economic parity with natives has significant long-term implications for their well-being and that of their children. In this talk I will present findings from two studies examining immigrants’ economic assimilation using a dataset that links respondents of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to their individual tax records. The first study examines the lifetime earnings trajectories of immigrants and measures the extent and speed with which they are able to reduce the earnings gap with natives. Findings from this study address key debates regarding ethnoracial and cohort differences in immigrants’ earnings trajectories. First, we find a racially differentiated pattern of earnings assimilation: black and Hispanic immigrants are less able to catch up with native whites’ earnings compared to white and Asian immigrants, but they are almost able to reach earnings parity with natives of their same race and ethnicity. Second, contrary to previous studies we find no evidence that recent immigrant cohorts are experiencing lower earnings growth. The second study examines immigrants’ job instability. We find that foreign-born men, particularly those who are undocumented, were at higher risk of losing their job and becoming involuntarily underemployed during the Great Recession even after controlling for demographic factors and job characteristics.

Small steps with Big Data: Using Machine Learning in Resource Economics

This talk looks at how recent developments in Big Data and Machine Learning are being used in conjunction with randomized controlled trials and large population level program evaluations to design, implement and measure efforts to change consumer behavior. We will explore the role played by very detailed consumption data (often at 15 minute intervals), as well as recent techniques such as deep learning to help us better understand individual and population behaviors, and which insights from behavioral sciences are effective at changing behaviors in areas such as energy conservation and efficiency.