"A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh," Erica Field, Duke University
2021-05-12 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Erica Field, Duke University
Seminar Co-Sponsor: Luskin Public Policy
Abstract: Child marriage remains common in many settings even where schooling and
labor market opportunities have grown considerably. To explain this phenomenon,
we introduce a marriage market signaling model in which bride type is not per-
fectly observed but preferred brides have lower benefits of delaying marriage.
This gives preferred brides an incentive to reveal their type by marrying young,
shifting the market towards early marriage even when everyone benefits from
delay. In this setting, a small incentive that shifts preferred brides towards later
marriage can delay marriage of all types through spillovers. We test this predic-
tion by evaluating the impact of a financial incentive to delay marriage among
15,576 adolescent girls in Bangladesh. Consistent with the theory, girls eligible
for the incentive for two years were 21% less likely to marry before 18, and
girls who were ineligible for the incentive but lived near treatment communities
also delayed marriage.
A recording of Dr. Field’s presentation may be accessed here.

"Prevalences, Penalties, and the Small Impact of Single Motherhood on America's High Child Poverty," David Brady, UC Riverside
2021-05-19 12:00 - 13:30
David Brady, UC Riverside
Abstract: Many claim high U.S. child poverty results from a high prevalence of single motherhood, and reducing single motherhood would substantially reduce child poverty. To scrutinize these arguments, we apply the “prevalences and penalties” framework to Luxembourg Income Study data across 30 rich democracies and over time within the U.S. 1979–2016. The descriptive patterns fail to support these claims. Although the U.S. has a moderately high prevalence of single motherhood, a fairly high prevalence is typical cross-nationally and in recent U.S. history. Single motherhood is the most common risk of the four major risks in the U.S., but this is because low education, young headship, and unemployment have declined. The U.S. has the highest penalty for single motherhood, however single motherhood has the smallest penalty of the four major risks in the U.S. and cross-nationally. A wide variety of counterfactual simulations demonstrate that reducing single motherhood would not substantially reduce child poverty. Even with zero single motherhood, U.S. child poverty would only move from the third to fourth highest among 30 rich democracies (from 21.3% to 18.8%). Ultimately, we demonstrate that the U.S. has systemically high child poverty for all family structures, and extremely high child poverty for racial/ethnic minorities regardless of single motherhood. Reducing the penalty attached to single motherhood and reducing America’s systemically high child poverty across all families would be far more effective than reducing the prevalence of single motherhood.
Biography: David Brady is a Professor in the School of Public Policy, and Director of the Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty at the University of California, Riverside. At UCR, he teaches classes on poverty, public policy analysis, and statistics.
More on Prof. Brady
You can find a recording of Dr. Brady’s presentation here.

"Demographic perspectives on COVID-19: one year later," Jennifer Beam Dowd, University of Oxford
2021-05-26 12:00 - 13:30
Jennifer Beam Dowd, University of Oxford
Abstract: While epidemiology is certainly having a moment, demography has been key to understanding COVID-19 data since the early days of the pandemic. This talk will take stock of demographic insights into COVID a year on ranging from the intersection of population age structure and mortality to estimates of excess mortality and optimal vaccination priority strategies. Dr. Dowd will also discuss the role of academics in science communication during this time and her experiences with the COVID-19 science communication effort Dear Pandemic.
Biography: Dr. Jenn Dowd is currently Associate Professor of Demography and Population Health and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, and Associate Member, Nuffield College. Dr. Dowd is a quantitative health and social scientist with interdisciplinary training in demography, epidemiology, economics, and infectious disease. Her research focuses on how social and biological processes interact over the life course and specifically how social factors “get under the skin” to impact health. She has examined the social determinants of infections and immune function and links between infections and chronic disease.
More on Prof. Beam Dowd
Dr. Beam Dowd’s presentation may be accessed here.

Fourth Annual Robert Mare Student Lecture: Marta Bornstein, PhD (c) Community Health Sciences, UCLA
2021-06-02 12:00 - 13:00
“Perceptions and experiences of (in)fertility, contraception, and reproductive health outcomes: A mixed methods study among women and men in Malawi”

Bio: Marta Bornstein recently defended her dissertation in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at UCLA. Her research focuses on reproductive health and justice of under-served populations in the U.S. and globally. In her dissertation research, Marta collaboratively conducted a mixed-methods study in Malawi to examine the relationship between infertility and reproductive health outcomes, contributing to a growing body of work on infertility as a public health issue. In her time at UCLA, Marta has published on infertility-related stigma and contraceptive preferences and use in Malawi, as well as additional research focused on the reproductive health needs of women in methadone treatment in Los Angeles. Prior to Marta’s doctoral studies, she worked in the private, non-profit, and government sectors, most recently at the CDC in the Department of STD Prevention. Marta earned her BA from Beloit College and MPH from Tulane University. Beginning in Fall 2021, Marta will be a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University, where she will collaborate with faculty in the College of Public Health and the Population Research Center on a research agenda focused on perceived and experienced infertility.

Abstract: Infertility and unintended pregnancy are dual burdens in Malawi, where approximately 40% of pregnancies are unintended and 20% of women report that they have experienced infertility or sub-fecundity. While public health has focused intently on promoting contraceptive use to prevent unintended pregnancy, infertility remains largely unaddressed in public health. The studies that form this dissertation fills a gap in the public health literature by examining the intersections of unintended fertility and infertility under a holistic reproductive life-course model. This hybrid explanatory-exploratory mixed methods dissertation uses in-depth interview, cross-sectional, and longitudinal data from the Umoyo Wa Thanzi (UTHA) cohort in Malawi (2014-2019).
Findings from the dissertation studies suggest that women’s perceptions and experiences of fertility influenced not only whether they used contraception or not, but how they used contraception as a way to manage their fertility (i.e., their ability to prevent and achieve pregnancies when desired). Additionally, findings suggest that both perceptions and experiences around fertility and fecundity have a role in contraceptive use/decision making, such that women who had experienced infertility (AOR: 0.56; p<0.01) or perceived themselves to be subfecund (AOR: 0.30; p<0.05) were less likely to be using contraception. In longitudinal analyses, however, women who had experienced infertility were just as likely as women who had not experienced infertility to experience a subsequent planned or unplanned pregnancy.

The studies in this dissertation provide one of the first assessments of how perceptions and experiences of fecundity (ability to become pregnant) and infertility (not conceiving a pregnancy after two or more years of trying), influenced if and how women used contraception, as well as subsequent pregnancy experiences. Findings suggest that experiencing a period of infertility or subfecundity in this population influences contraceptive use. However, findings also suggest that infertility or subfecundity may be episodic and not necessarily indicative of future fecundity. Research and interventions in public health must focus on fertility broadly – both experiences and perceptions – to ensure women can achieve their reproductive goals.

CCPR Welcome at the UCLA Sculpture Garden
2021-09-29 12:00 - 13:00 | Sculpture Garden

Welcome Introduction
2021-10-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual

Steven Ruggles, University of Minnesota
2021-10-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual
Decomposing Race Differentials in First Marriage Rates: United States, 1960-2019
I assess Wilson’s (1987) argument that the race differential in the frequency of marriage results from a shortage of marriageable men in the African-American community. Many previous investigators have approached this problem by measuring the local availability of eligible male marriage partners for Black women. These studies have found a significant impact of the availability of marriageable Black men on Black women’s marriage rates, but conclude that only a minority of the race difference in marriage can be ascribed to race differences in the availability of marriageable men.
My analysis simplifies the problem by evaluating the effects of economic characteristics of Black and White men on their own marriage behavior since 1960. I use novel measures of marriage rates derived from microdata together with Kitagawa/Das Gupta decomposition methods to assess the impact of income, occupation, employment status, and institutional residence on race differences in first marriage rates among men. The results show that from 1960 to 1980, race differences in economic composition can fully account for race differences in marriage rates. Indeed, in 1960 and 1970, marriage rates were substantially higher among Black men once compositional factors are controlled. In the 21stcentury the effects of male economic circumstances on race differences in marriage rates have diminished but remain substantial. The importance of male economic characteristics for marriage rates has diminished over the past six decades; this probably reflects the decline of male-breadwinner family and the rising importance of women’s economic resources.

The recording of Dr. Ruggles’ presentation may be access here.

CCPR Census Workshop Series Part 3: Getting the 2020 PL94 Then Using It
2021-10-20 12:00 - 13:30
Instructors:
Mike Tzen
Neal Fultz
In this CCPR Census Workshop (part 3/3), we will get the newly released 2020 Census Bureau PL94 data using the statistical programming language R. Along the way, we will point out recent criticisms of the data and highlight uses of the PL94. If time permits, we will post-stratify your special dataset using 2020 PL94 data as the reference ‘population control’. Attendees are encouraged to bring in a dataset they are interested in (not from the Census Bureau) where the data has the key demographic variables: Race, Age, and Hispanic Origin. Otherwise, we’ll poststratify a reddit survey about the NBA or a survey about the anime One Piece onto the PL94.

Slides to Part 3 are below
https://ucla.box.com/v/slides-cens-pt3-getusepl94

Parts 1 and 2 of the past CCPR Census Workshops can be viewed below

CCPR Census Workshop Series Part 2: Editing, Imputing, and Maintaining Privacy

Christy Erving, Vanderbilt University
2021-10-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual
Intersectional Stressors and Black Women’s Health in Established Adulthood
Health disparities research confirms relatively poor physical health of Black women vis-à-vis other race-gender groups. Though some research has sought to identify the extent to which social factors explain disparities between Black women and other race-gender groups, the possibility of race-gender specific social mechanisms undergirding these disparities remain underexplored. Moreover, in life span development research, the age range of 30 years to 45 years has recently been identified as a critical life course period referred to as established adulthood (Mehta et al. 2020). This stage is characterized by deep engagement with familial and work roles which could potentially elicit stress for individuals who also hold multiple marginalized statuses. Using data from a cohort of Black women, in this talk, I will explore how two recently developed gendered-racialized stress measures influence Black women’s health during established adulthood. Social mechanisms that may mitigate the influence of intersectional stressors on Black women’s health will also be discussed. Last, I will describe the implications of this work for health disparities research as well as empirical studies that adopt social stress and intersectional theoretical orientations.
A recording of Dr. Erving’s talk may be accessed here.

Martha J. Bailey, UCLA
2021-11-03 12:00 - 13:30
Biography: Dr. Martha J. Bailey is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California Los Angeles. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on issues in labor economics, demography and health in the United States, within the long-run perspective of economic history. Dr. Bailey’s work has examined the implications of the diffusion of modern contraception for women’s childbearing, career decisions, and the convergence in the gender gap.
How Subsidies Affect Contraceptive Use among Low-Income Women in the U.S.: A Randomized Control Trial

This paper examines how subsidies affect the use of contraceptives among low-income women seeking reproductive health care in the U.S. Study participants were randomized to receive vouchers for contraception, covering up to 50% or 100% of the lowest-cost, available long-acting, reversible contraceptive method (LARC). Women’s choice of method is highly sensitive to price, with the elasticity of LARC take-up ranging from -2.3 to -3.4. The findings imply that a U.S. policy eliminating out-of-pocket costs for Title X women would reduce pregnancies by 5.4%, birth rates by 3.5%, and abortions by 8.1% and save $2.48 billion annually in public expenditures.

The complete text may be accessed here.

Ian Lundberg, UCLA
2021-11-10 12:00 - 13:30
Prediction in Social Science: A Tool to Study Inequality in Populations
Biography: Ian Lundberg is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Sociology and California Center for Population Research at UCLA. His research develops statistical and machine learning methods to answer new questions about inequality in America. Past work is published or forthcoming in PNAS, the American Sociological Review, Demography, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods and Research, and Socius. This academic year, Ian is working on an NSF-funded postdoctoral project developing computational methods to study income mobility. In 2022, he will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. You can read more at ianlundberg.org.

Abstract: Predictive algorithms could transform methodology in social science, yet the mapping between prediction and scientific knowledge is not always clear. This talk will address three uses of prediction: (1) predicting outcomes for individual people, (2) predicting unobserved factual outcomes to describe populations, and (3) predicting counterfactual outcomes for causal claims. I will argue that prediction of individual-level outcomes is often difficult in social science, yet predictive algorithms which are imperfect for individuals (1) can nonetheless be useful in support of population-level claims (2 and 3). This framework for the use of prediction is well-suited to the integration of perspectives from social science (defining the population-level quantity to be estimated) and data science (building a predictive model to estimate that quantity).
You can access a recording of the presentation here.

Diana Greene Foster, University of California, San Francisco
2021-11-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual
Biography: Diana Greene Foster, PhD, is a demographer who uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. She is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and Director of Research at the UCSF ANSIRH Program. She led the Turnaway Study, a nationwide longitudinal prospective study of the health and well-being of women who seek abortion including both women who do and do not receive the abortion in the United States. She is currently collaborating with scientists on an NIH-funded Turnaway Study in Nepal. Dr. Foster received her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, her MA and PhD in Demography and Public Policy from Princeton University. She is the author of the 2020 book, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women and the Consequences of Having – or Being Denied – an Abortion. She is the recipient of the 2021 Harriet B. Presser Award for the study of gender and demography from the Population Association of America.
Consequences of receiving versus being denied a wanted abortion in the United States
Abstract: Diana Greene Foster will discuss the context and findings of The Turnaway Study. The Turnaway Study answers the question, Does abortion hurt women? and the converse, What are the harms when women are unable to get a wanted abortion? Dr. Foster will review the challenges of studying abortion and what has happened in the absence of rigorous data. She will describe the study design of the Turnaway Study and present its major findings about women’s mental health, physical health and the wellbeing of their children. She will describe the reasons people give for seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy and what that tells us about whether one can trust women’s decision-making abilities around pregnancy.

CCPR Demographic Computing Workshop
2021-12-01 12:00 - 13:30
Instructor: Matt Lahmann
Instructor: Mike Tzen
This workshop has two halves. In the first half, we will dive into the 3 main computing resources that CCPR offers to affiliates, including it’s remote and on campus offerings.
At the end of the first half, we’ll get participants signed up for hoffman2 and TS2. Once signed up, you’ll have state of the art hardware resources and most software you’ll ever need for demographic research.
In the second half, we’ll show you how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

You can access a recording of the workshop here.

Noreen Goldman, Princeton University
2022-01-12 12:00 - 13:30
Biography: Noreen Goldman, D.Sc., is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a Faculty Associate at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University. A specialist in demography and social epidemiology, Goldman’s research examines the impact of social and economic factors, as well as stressful experience, on health, and the physiological pathways through which these factors operate. She has designed several large-scale surveys in Latin America and Asia. Her current research examines racial and ethnic disparities in health in the US. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting professor at UCLA and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She is the author of more than 200 articles in population, epidemiology, sociology and statistics journals and various book chapters and monographs.
The Impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy in the US and Brazil: Disparities and Dependencies
Abstract: The US and Brazil have highest recorded number of COVID-19 deaths in the world: approximately 770,000 and 615,000 deaths respectively as of the end of November, 2021. The mortality impacts have been extraordinary, with the values of recent life expectancy setting some groups or geographic areas back to levels observed as far as two decades ago. In this talk, we explore some of the social and racial/ethnic disparities within each country. We also consider differences in estimates of life expectancy decline within the US and Brazil that result from the untenable assumption that COVID-19 is an “independent” cause of death.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.
The recording of the seminar may be accessed here.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, University of Minnesota
2022-01-19 12:00 - 13:30
Biography: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and the Minnesota Population Center. She specializes in racial inequality in mortality and historical infectious disease and co-leads (with J.P. Leider) an ongoing project on COVID-19 mortality in Minnesota. She is also a quantitative methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on demographic relationships.
“Racial Disparities in 1918 Flu Mortality: What Drove Them and What Can We Learn for Today?”
Abstract: The 1918 influenza pandemic stands out because of the extent and unusual age pattern of high mortality. In the United States, another feature merits scientific scrutiny: against a historical backdrop of extreme racial health inequality, the pandemic produced strikingly small ratios of nonwhite to white influenza and pneumonia mortality. We provide the most complete account to date of these racial disparities in 1918, showing that, across U.S. cities, they were almost uniformly small. We examine four potential explanations for this unexpected result, including socio-demographic factors like segregation, city-level implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), exposure to the milder spring 1918 “herald wave,” and early-life exposures to other influenza strains resulting in differential immunological vulnerability to the 1918 flu. While we find little evidence for 1-3, we offer suggestive evidence that racial variation in early-life exposure to the 1889-1892 influenza pandemic shrunk racial disparities during the 1918 pandemic. We also raise the possibility that differential behavioral responses to the herald wave may have protected nonwhite urban populations. By providing a comprehensive description and careful examination of the potential drivers of racial inequality in mortality during the 1918 pandemic, our study provides a framework to consider interactions between the natural history of particular microbial agents and the social histories of the populations they infect.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.
The recording of the seminar may be accessed here.

CCPR Workshop: Analyzing Sample Survey Data
2022-02-02 12:00 - 13:30
In this workshop, attendees will learn how to analyze survey data while accounting for its complex survey design. We will demonstrate how to specify the survey design, impute any missing data, and analyze the survey outcomes of interest. We will discuss how our downstream “analysis” steps are related to initial operational “design” choices made by the survey data provider. We will use R but also reference equivalent Stata routines.
slides
The recording may be accessed here.

Taylor Hargrove, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2022-02-09 12:00 - 13:00
Biography: Dr. Hargrove is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Her program of research examines how and why social inequalities in health unfold across the life course, focusing on inequalities by race/ethnicity, skin color, gender, and socioeconomic status. Her current program of research integrates biomedical perspectives into the study of health inequality in the US by exploring linkages among socio-geographic contexts, individual-level characteristics, and biological measures of health in early adulthood. The goal of this work is to elucidate how macro-level environments shape the consequences of social statuses on more proximate causes of poor health. Hargrove plans to continue this line of research in efforts to help elucidate the pathways through which social factors ‘get under our skin’ to shape health and undergird social stratification.
Mental Health across the Early life Course at the Intersections of Race, Skin Tone, and School Context
Abstract: Considerable research documents higher levels of depressive symptoms among Black Americans relative to whites. Yet, we know little about the role of other dimensions of race (e.g., skin tone) and early life contexts (e.g., childhood racial contexts) in shaping trajectories of depressive symptoms across adolescence and adulthood. This study asks: 1) to what extent do self-identified race and skin tone shape disparities in depressive symptoms between Black and white adults across ages 12-42? 2) Do the relationships between race/skin tone and depressive symptoms depend on school racial context, as measured by the racial composition of middle and high schools? This study uses five waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and employs growth curve models to address these questions. Overall, results suggest that trajectories of depressive symptoms across ages 12-42 vary by race and skin tone among Black adults. Further, racial and skin tone disparities in depressive symptom trajectories are contingent on school racial context, highlighting competing advantages and disadvantages of navigating majority spaces in early life for Black adults of different skin tones. Findings and implications will be discussed in more detail.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.

Jack Mountjoy, University of Chicago
2022-02-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Jack Mountjoy is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research explores the economics and econometrics of education, labor markets, and social mobility. Prior to joining Chicago Booth, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics at Princeton University in the Industrial Relations Section. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Affiliate at the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab, MIT Blueprint Labs, and Statistics Norway.
Jack holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation work earned a fellowship from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. He also holds a post-baccalaureate Certificate in Mathematics from George Washington University and a B.A. in Economics and Politics from Whitman College.

The Returns to College(s): Relative Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education

Abstract: Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking administrative high school records, college applications, admissions decisions, enrollment spells, degree completions, and quarterly earnings spanning the Texas population, we identify relative college value-added by comparing the outcomes of students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions, as this approach strikingly balances observable student potential across college treatments and renders our extensive set of covariates irrelevant as controls. Methodologically, we develop a framework for identifying and interpreting value-added under varying assumptions about match effects and sorting gains, generalizing the constant treatment effects assumption typically employed in the value-added literature. Empirically, we estimate a relatively tight, though non-degenerate, distribution of relative value-added across the wide diversity of Texas public universities. Selectivity poorly predicts value-added within student choice sets: a fleeting selectivity earnings premium fades to zero after a few years in the labor market, and more selective colleges tend to have lower value-added on STEM degree completion. Non-peer college inputs like instructional spending more strongly predict value-added, especially conditional on selectivity. Educational impacts predict labor market impacts: colleges with larger earnings value-added also tend to be colleges that boost persistence, BA completion, and STEM degrees along the way. Finally, we probe the potential for (mis)match effects by allowing each college’s relative value-added to vary flexibly by student characteristics. At first glance, Black students appear to face small negative returns to choosing more selective colleges, but this pattern of modest “mismatch” is entirely driven by the availability of two large historically Black universities with low selectivity but above-average value-added. Across the non-HBCUs, Black students face similar returns to selectivity, and indistinguishable value-added schedules more generally, compared to their peers from other backgrounds.

You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.
A recording of the seminar may be accessed here.

Berk Ozler, World Bank
2022-02-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Berk Ozler received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Boğaziçi University in 1991, and his Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University in 2001. After working on poverty and inequality measurement, poverty mapping, and the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development earlier, he decided to combine his interest in cash transfer programs and HIV risks facing young women in Africa by designing a large cash transfer experiment in Malawi, the longer-term evaluation of which is still ongoing. He has since conducted a number of cluster-randomized field experiments. He is currently interested in ways to reduce unintended pregnancies, especially among adolescent females and young women. He is trialing approaches to increase the take-up of modern contraceptives among this population with an adaptive experiment in Cameroon. He is a co-founder of and a regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
Can Improved Counseling Increase Willingness to Pay for Modern Contraceptives
Abstract: Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two barriers to long-acting reversible contraceptive adoption, credit, and informational constraints. The study offered discounts to the clients of a women’s hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and cross-randomized a counseling strategy that encourages shared decision-making using a tablet-based app that ranks modern methods. Discounts increased uptake by 50 percent, with larger effects for adolescents. Shared decision-making tripled the share of clients adopting a long-acting reversible contraceptive at full price, from 11 to 35 percent, and discounts had no incremental impact in this group.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.
A recording of the seminar may be accessed here.

Goleen Samari, Columbia University
2022-03-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Goleen Samari is an assistant professor and population health demographer in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her research considers how racism, gender inequities, and migration-based inequities shape reproductive and population health with a particular focus on populations in or from the Middle East and North Africa. She was the first to draw attention to the racialization of religious minorities and Islamophobia as a public health issue. Her research aims to understand and alleviate intersectional structural determinants of health over the life course and bridge some of the gap between research and policy. Dr. Samari is a former doctoral trainee of the California Center for Population Research, and she earned a Ph.D. in public health, an MPH in community health sciences, and an MA in Islamic studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Structural Xenophobia and Birth Outcomes: The Role of Exclusive Immigration Policies
Anti-immigrant stigma or xenophobia is increasingly pervasive globally. The epidemiological implications of the recent wave of xenophobic policies are increasingly of interest to population health scientists. This talk will present findings from a study that explores the impact of one such policy, the 2017 travel ban on individuals from Muslim majority countries, and birth outcomes among women from those countries residing in the US. We also consider how structural xenophobia can be measured and present a new measure, the immigration policy climate (IPC) index, that captures state immigration policy environments from 2009 to 2019. The IPC index includes fourteen inclusionary and exclusionary policies across all US states and Washington, DC. We will discuss how the IPC index offers opportunities to explore immigrant health and behavioral outcomes including reproductive and maternal health outcomes.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.

CCPR Workshop: Planning for and Writing an NIH grant proposal
2022-03-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Abstract: This seminar will describe key issues in planning for and writing a research grant proposal for the National Institutes of Health if you are a demographer, social scientist, and/or working on the social determinants of health. The emphasis will be on R01, R21, and R03 proposals. Participants are invited to bring their own experiences with NIH grant proposal preparation and questions for discussion.
The recording of the workshop may be accessed here.

DemSemX: Making the Most of Conferences
2022-03-21 13:00 - 14:15 | Zoom link https://go.wisc.edu/d4vz8f
Presenters: Elizabeth Bruch (Michigan), Lauren Gaydosh (UT-Austin), Jayanti Owens (Brown), Alexis Santos (Penn State), Rob Warren (Minnesota)
Moderated by: Jenna Nobles, UW–Madison
Join via Zoom at https://go.wisc.edu/d4vz8f
Co-sponsored by: Center for Family and Demographic Research (BGSU); Population Studies and Training Center (Brown); Cornell Population Center (Cornell); Population Studies Center (Michigan); Minnesota Population Center (UMN); Population Research Institute (PSU); Texas Population Research Center (UT-Austin); California Center for Population Research (UCLA); Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (Washington), Center for Demography and Ecology (UW–Madison).
Flyer here

CCPR 2022 PAA Practice Session
2022-03-30 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Nathan Hoffmann
Title: Strangers in the Homeland? The Academic Performance of Children of Return Migrants in Mexico
Abstract: The number of return migrants from the U.S. to Mexico has swelled in recent years, and yet we know little about the academic performance of the over 500,000 U.S.-born children who have accompanied them. This paper harnesses PISA test score data to compare U.S.-born children of return migrants in Mexico to two groups: Mexican-born students in Mexico, and students in the U.S. born to Spanish-speaking immigrant parents. Contrary to previous work highlighting the academic struggles faced by children of return migrants, these adolescents attain higher PISA scores than their Mexican-born counterparts. This advantage persists in models that control for both pre- and post-migration family characteristics. However, these adolescents’ scores are much lower than similar youths in the U.S., and controlling for variables related to immigrant selection barely changes estimates of disparities. Furthermore, results vary little by possible moderators. Overall, these findings suggest that these often forcibly displaced adolescents quickly assimilate to the relatively low educational standards of Mexican schools, highlighting the importance of institutional factors in the assimilation process.
Caitlin Ahern
Title: When and For Whom is College “Worth” It? The Direct and Indirect Effects of Less-Selective College Enrollment on Economic Insecurity
Abstract: As high-quality jobs and socioeconomic stability for less-educated workers have diminished, college is seen as the surest way to avoid negative socioeconomic outcomes. However, institutional differences suggest that the receipt of these economic benefits may depend not only on whether an individual enrolls in school but also where. In this study, I use data from the NLSY97 to assess how enrollment in a broad access institution – either a less-selective four-year college or a community college – affects low wage work and unemployment. I further assess the mediating pathway of degree attainment, and explore heterogeneity by socioeconomic background. Findings indicate that community college enrollment reduces low-wage work and unemployment relative to no college, and that less-selective four-year college rather than community college enrollment reduces low wage work. Yet, less-selective four-year college enrollment rather than more-selective four-year college enrollment does not appear to increase low wage work or unemployment. In addition, degree attainment appears to substantially mediate the effects of broad-access enrollment on low wage work. Finally, although I find some suggestive evidence of heterogeneity by socioeconomic background in the direct effects of community college and less-selective four-year college enrollment on low-wage work, the results are imprecise and no clear pattern emerges.

Sandra Black, Columbia University
2022-04-12 15:30 - 17:00 | In-person seminar: Bunche 9383
Biography: Sandra E. Black is Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Since that time, she worked as an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and an Assistant, Associate, and ultimately Professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA, and held the Audre and Bernard Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin before arriving at Columbia University. She is currently an Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and was previously a Co-Editor and Editor of the Journal of Human Resources. Dr. Black is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Director of the NBER Study Group on Economic Mobility. She served as a Member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from August 2015-January 2017. Her research focuses on the role of early life experiences on the long-run outcomes of children, as well as issues of gender and discrimination.
“Where Does Wealth Come From?”
Abstract: Much attention has been given to rising wealth inequality in recent decades. However, understanding inequality requires an understanding of how wealth relates to the potential wealth an individual could accumulate and where this wealth comes from. Using administrative data from Norway, we create measures of potential wealth that abstract from differential consumption and spending behavior. We then examine how these measures relate to observed net wealth of individuals at a point in time and the role played by different sources of wealth in the distribution of potential wealth. We find that net wealth is a reasonable proxy for potential wealth, particularly in the tails of the distribution. Importantly, people in different parts of the potential wealth (or actual net wealth) distribution get their wealth from very different sources. Labor income is the most important determinant of wealth, except among the top 1%, where capital income and capital gains on financial assets become important. Inheritances and gifts are not an important determinant of wealth, even at the top of the wealth distribution. Finally, although inheritances are not important, parental wealth does influence child’s wealth; children of wealthy parents accumulate wealth from very different sources than children of less wealthy parents.
A recording of Dr. Black’s talk may be accessed here.

Stephen Machin, London School of Economics
2022-04-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, has been President of the European Association of Labour Economists, is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and was an independent member of the UK Low Pay Commission from 2007-14. His current research interests feature the study of labour market inequality, social mobility, education and crime, and the interactions between them.
“Real Wage Stagnation and the Brexit Exchange Rate Depreciation”
Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin
Abstract: Immediately after the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, the value of sterling plummeted to record its biggest 24 hour depreciation since the collapse of Bretton Woods. This caused an intermediate import cost shock, not offset by an export revenue gain, and aggregate real wage growth stalled. Real wages fell more and stagnated for workers employed in industries, largely in the services sector, that experienced a bigger cost shock.

Workshop: CCPR Computing Resources Overview
2022-04-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Instructor: Matt Lahmann
Instructor: Mike Tzen
This workshop has two halves. In the first half, we will dive into the 3 main computing resources that CCPR offers to affiliates, including it’s remote and on campus offerings. At the end of the first half, we’ll get participants signed up for hoffman2 and TS2. Once signed up, you’ll have state of the art hardware resources and most software you’ll ever need for demographic research. In the second half, we’ll walk through how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

Rasmus Landerso, Institute of Labor Economics
2022-05-04 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Rasmus Landersø is a Research Professor at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rasmus has received his BA from the University of Copenhagen and his PhD from Aarhus University, and he has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago. Rasmus is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Capital, and he is also an associate member of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD) and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) working group, a Research Associate at Center for Research & Analysis of Migration (CReAM), and Research Affiliate at IZA. Rasmus’ research interests include labor economics, the economics of education, the economics of crime, and applied microeconometrics. His research covers both studies of intergenerational mobility, inequality, welfare policies, and spillovers in criminal behavior.
More information about Dr. Landerso may be accessed here.
The Consequences of Cutting Welfare Benefits for Refugees
A key concern when introducing welfare reforms to incentivize employment and self-sufficiency is how disincentives from more generous welfare programs, on the one hand, should be balanced against the potential adverse consequences of lower income and exposure to poverty for vulnerable groups, on the other hand. With Europe standing on the verge of an immense humanitarian crisis with large refugee flows, information on how welfare policies affect refugees’ lives is critical. This presentation will be based on two papers where we study the intended and unintended effects of Denmark’s Start Aid welfare reform from 2002 using administrative register data tracking individuals for up to two decades after the reform’s implementation. While the reform led to substantial short run increases in employment, the effects quickly faded with local demand being an important mediating factor. In addition, we document numerous adverse consequences for families that manifest in different outcomes and with different timing according to the age when individuals were first exposed to the large reduction in disposable income induced by the reform. These include increases to crime for adults and adolescents as well as reductions to completed schooling and lower GPA for refugees who were children when they arrived in Denmark.
The recording of Dr. Landerso’s talk may be accessed here.

Katie Genadek, University of Colorado, Boulder & U.S. Census Bureau
2022-05-11 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Katie R. Genadek is the Director of the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage (DCDL) project and an Economist working at the U.S. Census Bureau. She is also a faculty associate at the University of Colorado – Boulder. She previously worked at the University of Minnesota where she managed the IPUMS-USA data project. She is a demographer and economist, and her research is focused on the relationship between policy, work, family, and time use.
More information about Dr. Genadek may be accessed here.
Motherhood Wage Penalties over the Life-Course in the United States: Results from Administrative Data
Abstract: Women with children are shown to experience a motherhood wage penalty, and it is often assumed leaving the labor force for long periods results in the growth of this penalty. However, there has been limited investigations into the relationship between the length of time out of the labor force and the wage penalties related to it. This study uses administrative data linked to survey data to investigate is the relationship between time out of employment and over the life course for mothers. This unique dataset includes yearly earnings data from 1950s-the present from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for respondents in the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement data from 2001-present. By linking these two data sets, along with information on births from SSA, this longitudinal dataset is one of the most comprehensive panels of women’s fertility, employment, and wage trajectories ever created for the United States. We find non-linear impacts of years out of employment on wages for mothers over the life course and will investigate demographic and socio-economic variation in life-cycle wages by years spent out of the labor force.

Kari White, The University of Texas at Austin
2022-05-18 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Kari White is an associate professor in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on evaluating the interrelationship between people’s reproductive health behaviors and outcomes and the health services and policies that shape their access to care. She is the lead investigator of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project – a multidisciplinary group of researchers who have been evaluating the impact of Texas’ legislation and policies related to contraception and abortion for 10 years. Her other recent projects include studies examining factors influencing vasectomy use and people’s access to abortion care in the Deep South. She co-led amicus briefs submitted to the US Supreme Court in June Medical Services v Russo and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, summarizing extensive research on the adverse effects of abortion restrictions to challenge laws in Louisiana and Mississippi, respectively.
More information about Dr. White may be accessed here.
“Assessing the impact of abortion restrictions in Texas”
This presentation will provide an overview of how Dr. White and colleagues have assessed the impact of abortion restrictions in Texas over nearly 10 years. This will include a review of the diverse data and methodological approaches used to assess changes in abortions provided in Texas, out of state and pregnant people’s experiences accessing abortion care, as well as rapid response data collection activities.
A recording of Dr. White’s talk may be accessed here.

Ping Qin, University of Oslo
2022-05-25 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Dr Ping Qin is professor at National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention, University of Oslo in Norway, and head of research group for register-based study on suicide and self-harm. Professor Qin has been dedicated to reseach on suicide prevention and psychiatric epidemiology for more than 25 years, with extensive experience in population studies with data from longitudinal registries, previously in Denmark and since 2012 in Norway. Her main focus of research has been quantitative investigation on contextual influence of multifactorial exposures on risk for suicidal behavior and follow-up care for people with deliberate self-harm. She has led a number of international collaboration projects. She is the co-chair of 2021 IASR/AFSP International Summit on Suicide Reseach, a founding co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide and Self-harm in Middle-aged Adults, and past Vice-President of International Association for Suicide Prevention.
More information about Dr. Qin may be accessed here.
Suicide Prevention Research: Searching Evidence from Real-life Data in Routine Registers
Abstract: Routine population registries offer extensive opportunities for research because the data is recorded uniformly, precisely and longitudinally, and often covers a large population. The registries allow research on children as well as adults, enable follow-up of individual subjects beyond the limited time span, and ensure cost-efficient and easy access to data of both common and rare exposures. Starting from the Nordic countries and increasingly more from other parts of the world, a range of studies have used this valuable source of data to search for meaningful evidence on factors contributing to suicide and suicide prevention. The studies have been able to include a great variety of social and health-related factors to study their contextual effect on risk for suicide and deliberate self-harm, to disentangle contributing effects of specific exposures, to examine interactive effects of multiple exposures, and to assess the effect of clinical treatments and inventions. In this lecture I will discuss strengths and limitations in utilizing register data for suicide research, and present important findings from our group. Emphases will go to investigation on temporal, contextual and interactive effects of socioeconomic disadvantages, adverse experiences and psychiatric and physical illnesses, and on what follow-up psychiatric care was delivered to patients presenting to hospitals with deliberate self-harm and what effect it had on the patients’ health prospectively.
