Leticia Marteleto, UT Austin

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Live Births and Fertility amidst the Zika Virus Epidemic in Brazil

Abstract: In late 2015, the Brazilian Ministry of Health classified the increase in congenital malformations associated with the Zika Virus (ZIKV) a public health emergency. The risk of ZIKV-related congenital syndrome posed an exogenous threat to reproductive outcomes that could result in declining numbers of live births and potentially fertility. Using 2014-2016 monthly microdata on live births from the Brazilian Information System on Live Births, in this talk I examine live births and fertility trends amidst the ZIKV epidemic in Brazil. Findings suggest a decline in live births that is stratified across socioeconomic status and geographic lines, especially nine months after the call for pregnancy postponement. While declines in total fertility rates were small, fertility trends estimated by age and socioeconomic status suggest important differences in how Zika might have impacted Brazil’s fertility structure. Further findings using monthly data by municipality suggest that the epidemic resulted in a significant decline in fertility even when controlling for characteristics of the municipality. The findings highlight the importance of understanding how exposure to the risk of a health threat directed at fetuses has led to declines in fertility.

CCPR 2019 PAA Practice Session

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Please join us to hear our residents interesting research and give feedback for their upcoming PAA presentations. Presenters: Amanda Gonzalez, "Do You Need to Pay for Quality Care? Exploring Associations Between Bribes and Out-of-Pocket Expenditures on Quality of Labor and Delivery Care in High Volume Public Health Facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India" Mary Robbins, "A […]

Yingchun Ji, Shanghai University

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Understanding China's Low Fertility in a Gender and Development Approach

Without a surge of new born babies after the Chinese government relaxed the 40-year-long strict one-child family planning policy in 2013 and 2015, the focus of debates regarding China’s declining fertility has shifted from policy to economic and social forces. Different from the mainstream demographers in China, we propose a gender and development approach to understand low fertility in post-reform China. During China's transition from the socialist planned economy to market economy, the old danwei system collapsed and the public and private spheres are increasingly separating, resulting in women's intensified work-family conflicts. Emphasizing on women's dual roles regarding material production and social reproduction, we argue that sustainable fertility, gender equality and economic development can either create a virtuous circle or be trapped in a vicious circle.

With a certain degree of gender equality in both the labor market and the private families, adult women can fully exert their talents at work which can both contribute to economic growth, and also empower them at home. This can help them realize their fertility desires. With unsatisfying or uneven gender equality in the two spheres, either some Chinese women can be pushed out of the labor market to have a second child, or young women may choose to focus on personal development, and postpone or forgo marriage/fertility. We also propose a multi-party-participation social mechanism to address the long term low fertility in China, encouraging individual men and women, family, business and government to all share the duty of social reproduction.

Jennifer Ahern, UC Berkeley

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

Leveraging big data to assess health effects of changes in physical and social environments, and policy and program implementation

In the era of big data there are opportunities to answer policy-relevant health questions in ways that are timely and cost-efficient. This talk will describe coordination of health data resources for health monitoring and to address questions about the health effects of policies in California. Examples of health effect assessments, including those related to gun shows and the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA), will be presented.

Workshop: UCLA IRB Application Process

Workshop: UCLA IRB Application Process Presentation by Moore Rhys Assistant Director, Education and Quality, Office of the Human Research Protection Program, UCLA This workshop will provide an overview of the UCLA IRB application process and related policies and procedures. Learning goals for this workshop include: 1)      Understanding when IRB review is required and when it […]

Susan Athey, Stanford University

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

Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and Optimal Treatment Assignment Policies

This talk will review recently developed methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects and optimal treatment assignment policies in experimental and observational studies, including settings with unconfoundedness or instrumental variables. Multi-armed bandits for learning treatment assignment policies will also be considered.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Social Statistics

Brandon Stewart, Princeton University

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

How to Make Causal Inferences Using Texts

Texts are increasingly used to make causal inferences: either with the document serving as the treatment or the outcome. We introduce a new conceptual framework to understand all text-based causal inferences, demonstrate fundamental problems that arise when using manual or computational approaches applied to text for causal inference, and provide solutions to the problems we raise.  We demonstrate that all text-based causal inferences depend upon a latent representation of the text and we provide a framework to learn the latent representation.  Estimating this latent representation, however, creates new risks: we may unintentionally create a dependency across observations or create opportunities to fish for large effects.  To address these risks, we introduce a train/test split framework and apply it to estimate causal effects from an experiment on immigration attitudes and a study on bureaucratic responsiveness.  Our work provides a rigorous foundation for text-based causal inferences, connecting two previously disparate literatures. (Joint Work with Egami, Fong, Grimmer and Roberts)

Co-sponsored with the Center for Social Statistics

Tomas Jimenez, Stanford University

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life

The immigration patterns of the last three decades have profoundly changed nearly every aspect of life in the United States. What do those changes mean for the most established Americans—those whose families have been in the country for multiple generations? The Other Side of Assimilation shows that assimilation is not a one-way street. Jiménez explains how established Americans undergo their own assimilation in response to profound immigration-driven ethnic, racial, political, economic, and cultural shifts.

Co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration and the Race and Ethnicity Sociology Working Group

Workshop: Getting All Your Research Computing Tools for Summer and Beyond – Hardware and Software

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Title: Getting All Your Research Computing Tools for Summer and Beyond - Hardware and Software Location: May 22, 2019 @ 12:00-1:30 PM 4240 Public Affairs Building CCPR Seminar Room Instructors: Matt Lahmann & Mike Tzen Content: We’ll get CCPR researchers all the computing tools for a productive summer of data science exploration. We'll get you […]

Pascaline Dupas, Stanford University

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

The Incidence of Public Subsidies to Private Hospitals under Weak Governance: Evidence from India (joint with Radhika Jain)

Expanding public health insurance and enlisting private agents for service delivery are common policy strategies to meet the goals of universal health coverage, but there is limited evidence from developing countries to inform their design. This paper, joint with Radhika Jain from Harvard School of Public Health, provides quantitative evidence on how insurance design affects program performance and incidence in the context of a government-funded health insurance program that aims to provide free care to 46 million people in Rajasthan, India. We exploit a policy-induced natural experiment, and use administrative claims linked to patient surveys, to provide the first large-scale evidence of private hospital behavior under public health insurance.

Workshop: Getting The Data Yourself – A Web Scraping Code Through

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Title: Getting The Data Yourself: A Web Scraping Code Through Location: May 29, 2019 @ 12:00-1:30 PM 4240 Public Affairs Building CCPR Seminar Room Instructors: Chad Pickering & Mike Tzen Content: We’ll empower CCPR researchers to get the domain-relevant data they want   slides exercise

Second Annual Robert Mare Student Lectureship: Carolina Arteaga, PhD (c) Economics, UCLA

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

Essays in Education and Crime in Colombia

This dissertation contains three essays in applied microeconomics. In the first chapter paper, I test whether the return to college education is the result of human capital accumulation or instead reflects the fact that attending college signals higher ability to employers. The second chapter provides evidence that parental incarceration increases children’s educational attainment. Finally, in the third chapter I derive a new expression that extends the Local Average Treatment Effect concept, to a setting with two sources of unobserved treatment heterogeneity.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science

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

The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is open to both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived).

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Panel Presentation

Luskin Conference Center Laureate Room

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Panel Presentation

Friday June 21, 2019 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Reception 5:00pm – 6:00pm
Luskin Conference Center Laureate Room
• 2:00pm – 3:15pm Digital Demography
Prof. Dennis Feehan, UC Berkeley and Prof. Ka-Yuet Liu, UCLA
• 3:30pm – 4:45pm Computational Causal Inference
Prof. Judea Pearl, UCLA and Prof. Sam Pimentel, UC Berkeley

Big Data for Big Social Issues

UCLA Neuroscience Research Building Auditorium (NRB 132)

Big Data for Big Social Issues Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Panel: 1:00pm - 2:45pm Prof. John Friedman, Brown University: "Income Inequality and Social Mobility: What Can We Learn from Big Data?" 3:00pm-5:00pm Reception 5:00-6:00pm Click here to view a recording of the talk  A defining feature of the American Dream is upward income […]

Welcome and Introductions

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

"Welcome and Introductions"

Please come join us to learn all about the California Center for Population Research!

This will be the kick-off event for the start of the upcoming 2019-2020 CCPR Seminar Series.

Jonathan Daw, Penn State University

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

"Renal Relationships: Understanding Living Kidney Donor Relationship Patterns"

Abstract: Who do we turn to in times of need? Traditionally, social support research has shown a strong preference to rely on strong ties in these scenarios - often, even when weak ties might be better positioned to help. However, this conclusion has recently been challenged by Small (2017), who argues that people often rely on weak ties for emotional support in stressful times, preferring to avoid more complicated strong ties. This suggests that the types of ties we activate in times of need varies by the situation. In this study, we apply this framework to the study of living donor kidney transplantation (LDKT), effectively asking: How does this behavior differ when the stakes are potentially life and death? Using a variety of primary and secondary datasets, we compare the distribution of LDKT ties to the distribution of ties who would be likely able to help, then seek to explain these relative utilization patterns as a function of medical fundamentals, social/spatial relationships, and qualitative reasoning invoked by survey respondents. Our preliminary findings show that LDKT patterns are primarily driven by social relationship quality, and far less by medical fundamentals such as the potential donors' health or genetic relationship to the patient.

Adriana Lleras-Muney, UC Los Angeles

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

"Can Labor Market Discrimination Explain Racial Disparities in Schooling? Evidence from WWII"

Abstract: Can the racial gap in labor market earnings explain black-white disparities in the schooling of the next generation? To answer this, we exploit the large increase in labor demand in markets that received WWII defense industry contracts. This increase in labor demand combined with a policy that prohibited discrimination by race and ethnicity in the defense industries resulted in significant increases in African American earnings and declines in the racial gap in earnings between 1940 and 1950. This was achieved largely via occupational upgrading among African Americans into semi-skilled professions. In contrast with women, whose progress in the labor market was largely reversed in short order, this occupational upgrading persisted for African Americans. We argue that this persistence is consistent with declines in statistical discrimination. Moreover, we find that in these same labor markets, the next generation of African Americans invested relatively more in their human capital, as measured by greater years of schooling and a decline in the black-white schooling gap. We explore three reasons why reductions in the black white earnings gap might lead to reductions in the black white schooling gap of the next generation. First, this would relax the financial constraint faced by many African American families, allowing their children to remain in school longer. Second, occupational upgrading might have increased the returns to human capital among African Americans. Finally, there may be political responses that result in changes in public funding and provision of schooling and other public goods that affect the human capital accumulation of the next generation of African Americans. We find evidence consistent with the first explanation only. We conclude that efforts to further reduce the racial gap in schooling might consider labor market interventions.

Workshop: Data Carpentry for Social Science

Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners' existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learned to their own research. Participants will be encouraged […]

Michelle Jackson, Stanford University

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

A Century of Educational Inequality in the United States

Abstract: The “income inequality hypothesis” holds that rising income inequality affects the distribution of a wide range of social and economic outcomes. Research highlighting the sharp increase in educational inequality in recent decades has fuelled concerns that rising income inequality has had damaging consequences for equality of educational opportunity, even while other researchers have provided descriptive evidence at odds with the income inequality hypothesis. In this paper we track long-term trends in family income inequalities in college enrollment ("enrollment inequality") using all available nationally representative datasets for cohorts born between 1908 and 1995. We show that the trend in enrollment inequality moved in lockstep with the trend in income inequality over the past century. There is one exception to this general finding: for cohorts at risk of serving in the Vietnam War, enrollment inequality was high while income inequality was low. During this period, enrollment inequality was significantly higher for men than for women. Aside from this singular confounding event, evidence on a century of enrollment inequality establishes a strong association between income inequality and enrollment inequality, providing support for the view that rising income inequality is fundamentally changing the distribution of life chances.
Co-sponsored with the Social Stratification, Inequality and Mobility Working Group