Meeting the Challenge of Homelessness

UCLA NPI Auditorium CHS C8-183

"Meeting the Challenge of Homelessness"

Ending homelessness and serving the needs of our most vulnerable individuals and families is possible, but it requires sustained effort. Culhane will kick off the week by reviewing the national situation, including progress and continued hurdles. He will also describe unique challenges for cities like LA where many homeless are unsheltered.

Dennis Culhane, University of Pennsylvania

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"The Promise of Integrated Data Systems for Social Science Research"

Abstract: Integrated Data Systems (IDS) linking administrative, public agency data hold great promise for rapid and low-cost implementation and evaluation of homeless initiatives. Culhane will review the legal, ethical, scientific and economic challenges of interagency data sharing, as well as systematic efforts including policy reform and inter-agency collaboration to overcome these challenges. Finally, he will review important new IDS initiatives in LA County and California.

V. Joseph Hotz, Duke University

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"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.

Partnership UCLA Russian Delegation

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Organizers: Dora Costa, Economics Department June 5-7, 2018 4240 Public Affairs Building Through mutually beneficial partnerships-with our alumni and friends in the professional world, government agencies, and community organizations-the College of Letters & Science has long paved the way for continued leadership, impact and excellence. We have successfully consolidated and strengthened these partnerships, through Partnership […]

First Annual Robert Mare Student Lectureship

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

"Early Estimates of the Effects of Public School Shootings in California on California Public Schools"

Abstract: I employ data from California public schools covering years 1991 to 2017 with data on public school shootings in the state of California over the same period to study the effects of school shootings on schools. This project aims to understand how dropout, enrolment, and achievement measures respond to school shootings. A secondary objective includes discerning whether fatal and non-fatal shootings have differential effects on schools and student outcomes. I will present early results, and I welcome helpful comments and criticism.

Dr. Henry F. Raymond, Rutgers University & UC San Francisco

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

"Sampling Hidden Populations: Respondent Drive Sampling"

Abstract: Dr. Raymond will discuss the background and implementation of Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) studies which is wide use among hidden populations the world over. He will review the theoretical basis of RDS including what biases RDS analysis corrects for. Dr. Raymond will share some examples of RDS analysis using RDS Analyst.

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

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

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.

2018-2019 CCPR Welcome and Introductions

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

2018-2019 CCPR Welcome and Introductions

Please come join us to learn all about the California Center for Population Research!
Professors Jennie Brand, Patrick Heuveline and Hiram Beltran-Sanchez will be presenting.
This will be the kick-off event for the start of the upcoming 2018-2019 CCPR Seminar Series.

California Center for Population Research 20th Anniversary Research Symposium

Covel Commons UCLA

October 12th, 2018 Covel Commons, UCLA The California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at UCLA was founded in 1998, and thus celebrates its 20-year anniversary in 2018. This is a full day conference covering various topics related to population studies. CCPR Alumna from all over the country will present their current work.

Erin Hartman, University of California Los Angeles

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Covariate Selection for Generalizing Experimental Results

Researchers are often interested in generalizing the average treatment effect (ATE) estimated in a randomized experiment to non-experimental target populations. Researchers can estimate the population ATE without bias if they adjust for a set of variables affecting both selection into the experiment and treatment heterogeneity.Although this separating set has simple mathematical representation, it is often unclear how to select this set in applied contexts. In this paper, we propose a data-driven method to estimate a separating set. Our approach has two advantages. First, our algorithm relies only on the experimental data. As long as researchers can collect a rich set of covariates on experimental samples, the proposed method can inform which variables they should adjust for. Second, we can incorporate researcher-specific data constraints. When researchers know certain variables are unmeasurable in the target population, our method can select a separating set subject to such constraints, if one is feasible. We validate our proposed method using simulations, including naturalistic simulations based on real-world data.

Co-Sponsored with The Center for Social Statistics

Trans-Pacific Labor Seminar

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

The Trans-Pacific Labor Seminar is part of a conference series that brings together Japanese and U.S. economics scholars. The idea is to foster trans-pacific exchange and collaboration, and usually half of the participants are from Japan and half are U.S. based. The conference is co-sponsored by the International Institute, the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, […]

Berk Ozler, World Bank

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

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 

Workshop: Getting your Computational Tools for Research

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Instructor: Michael Tzen Title: Getting your Computational Tools for Research Location: October 25, 2018, 2:00-3:00 PM 4240 Public Affairs Building CCPR Seminar Room Content: We'll get you started on Github, Rstudio, Stata, and accessing Hoffman2 (UCLA's high performance computing cluster). Please RSVP below https://goo.gl/forms/W6hkM3bnOjfnYGJw2 slides

Dalton Conley, Princeton University

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

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 

Introducing the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brasil)

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Fabíola Bof de Andrade, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Instituto de Pesquisas René Rachou, Brazil & James Macinko, UCLA This seminar will provide an introduction to the newest study in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) family, the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging. The speakers will describe the overall study design and the main topics covered, highlight […]

Chad Hazlett, UCLA

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

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.

Adrian Raftery, University of Washington

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Bayesian Population Projections with Migration Uncertainty

The United Nations recently issued official probabilistic population projections for all countries for the first time, using a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework developed by our group at the University of Washington. These take account of uncertainty about future fertility and mortality, but not international migration. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical autoregressive model for obtaining joint probabilistic projections of migration rates for all countries, broken down by age and sex. Joint trajectories for all countries are constrained to satisfy the requirement of zero global net migration. We evaluate our model using out-of-sample validation and compare point projections to the projected migration rates from a persistence model similar to the UN's current method for projecting migration, and also to a state of the art gravity model. We also resolve an apparently paradoxical discrepancy between growth trends in the proportion of the world population migrating and the average absolute migration rate across countries. This is joint work with Jonathan Azose and Hana Ševčíková.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Social Statistics 

Workshop: Practical Survey Analysis

Instructor: Michael Tzen Title: Practical Survey Analysis Location: November 15, 2018, 2:00-3:00 PM 4240 Public Affairs Building CCPR Seminar Room Content: We'll walk thru key steps of a data analysis involving a complex survey design. Please RSVP below https://goo.gl/forms/evIP7G8PN0UBG7x72   slides rscript