NBER Cohort Studies Meeting 2017

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

CCPR is hosting the annual NBER Cohort Studies meeting which brings together researchers from different fields interested in aging related issues or in methodologies applicable to aging and has set the seeds for synergistic relationships between economists, sociologists, demographers, psychologists, epidemiologists, and MDs. The meeting is funded in part by an NIH conference grant through […]

The Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar (PPASS), Amy Finkelstein

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

The Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar (PPASS) series invites leading scholars from both UCLA and universities across the nation to present new research on a wide variety of important issues, including crime, labor markets, human capital and education, inequality and poverty, the environment, public finance, political economy, urban economics, health care reform, and […]

West Coast Experiments Conference, UCLA 2017

Covel Commons UCLA

The tenth annual West Coast Experiments Conference will be held at UCLA on Monday, April 24 and Tuesday, April 25, 2017, preceded by in-depth methods training workshops on Sunday, April 23. The conference registration webpage is wce2017ucla.eventbrite.com. The WCE is an annual conference that brings together leading scholars and graduate students in economics, political science and other social sciences who […]

Mark Duggan, Stanford University

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

"To Work for Yourself, for Others, or Not at All? How Disability Benefits Affect The Employment Decisions of Older Veterans "

ABSTRACT
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program provides disability benefits to nearly one in five military veterans in the US and its annual expenditures exceed $60 billion. We examine how the receipt of DC benefits affects the employment decisions of older veterans. We make use of variation in program eligibility resulting from a 2001 policy change that increased access to the program for Vietnam veterans who served with “boots on the ground” in the Vietnam theater but not for other veterans of that same era. We find that the policy-induced increase in program enrollment decreased labor force participation and induced a substantially larger switch from wage employment to self-employment. This latter finding suggests that an exogenous increase in income spurred many older veterans to start their own businesses. Additionally, we estimate that one in four veterans who entered the DC program due to this policy change left the labor force, estimates in the same range as those from recent studies of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program.

Political Sociology and the Global South Student Conference: Interdisciplinary Insights from the Global South

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

Political Sociology Working Group, UCLA Political Sociology and the Global South Student Conference: Interdisciplinary Insights from the Global South May 5th, 2017 4240 Public Affairs Building The UCLA Political Sociology and the Global South Working Group in collaboration with the Institute on Inequality and Democracy invites abstract submissions for an interdisciplinary graduate student conference. We […]

Jere R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania

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

"Early-Life Undernourishment in Developing Countries: Prevalence, Impacts over the Life Cycle and Determinants"

ABSTRACT

Early-life undernourishment is a widespread phenomenon in many developing countries, with an estimated 170 million children under 5 years of age stunted, the standard indicator of chronic malnutrition. This presentation summarizes an ongoing work program on this topic, with reference to the prevalence, impacts and determinants of such undernutrition.

Marcella Alsan, Stanford University

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

"Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men"

ABSTRACT
For forty years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black males with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study's methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical community. We find that the historical disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.4 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men.

Analysis of Complex Surveys using R and Stata

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

Instructors: Michael Tzen, CCPR UCLA Andy Lin, IDRE UCLA Location: May 19, 2017 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm 4240 Public Affairs Building Abstract: In this workshop, attendees will learn how to analyze survey data while accounting for its complex survey design. Using both the R and Stata software packages, we will demonstrate how to specify […]

Shahryar Minhas, Duke University

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

The Center for Social Statistics Presents: Predicting the Evolution of Intrastate Conflict: Evidence from Nigeria url: http://css.stat.ucla.edu/event/shahryar-minhas/ The endogenous nature of civil conflict has limited scholars' abilities to draw clear inferences about the drivers of conflict evolution. We argue that three primary features characterize the complexity of intrastate conflict: (1) the interdependent relationships of conflict between […]

Research Ethics: The Use of Big Data

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

The use of big data has become increasingly common in social and health research, raising a series of new and difficult questions about research ethics.  In this informal workshop, a panel of investigators using big data for their research will describe issues that they have faced and other potential problems.  As background to this workshop, […]

Fragile Families Challenge: Getting Started Workshop

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

“Fragile Families Challenge: Getting Started Workshop” Ian Lundberg Ph.D. Student, Sociology and Social Policy,  Princeton University The Fragile Families Challenge is a scientific mass collaboration that combines predictive modeling, causal inference, and in-depth interviews in order to learn more about the lives of disadvantaged children. Fragile Families Challenge builds on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study […]

UCLA – HKUST International Symposium on Segregation & Neighborhood Effects

UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, United States

UCLA – HKUST International Symposium on Segregation & Neighborhood Effects June 6th 2017, 9:00 AM – 5:15 PM UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate Symposium Agenda: 1) Segregation in the United States and its Global Impact. Discussant: Michael Lens, UCLA. 2) New Measures and New Impacts: Segregation in the United States. Discussant: Anne Pebley, UCLA. […]

Randall Akee, UCLA

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

"Reservation Employer Establishments: Data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Data Set"

Abstract: The presence of employers and jobs on American Indian reservations has been difficult to analyze due to limited data. We are the first to geocode confidential data on employer establishments from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) to identify location on or off American Indian reservations. We identify the per-capita establishment count and jobs in reservation-based employer establishments for most federally recognized reservations. Comparisons to nearby non-reservation areas in the lower 48 states across 18 industries, reveal that reservations have a similar sectoral distribution of employer establishments but have significantly fewer of them in nearly all sectors, especially when the area population is below 15,000 (as it is on the vast majority of reservations and for the majority of the reservation population). By contrast, total jobs provided by reservation establishments are, on average, at par with or somewhat higher than in nearby county areas but are concentrated among casino-related and government employers. An implication is that average employment per establishment are higher in these sectors on reservations, including those with populations below 15,000, while the rest of the economy is sparser in reservations (in firm count and jobs per capita) Geographic and demographic factors such as population density and per capita income statistically account for some but not all of these differences.

James Robins, Harvard University

Room 33-105 CHS Building 650 Charles E Young Drive South, Los Angeles, CA, United States

The UCLA Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents: Causal Methods in Epidemiology: Where has it got us and what can we expect in the future? The principal focus of Dr. Robins’ research has been the development of analytic methods appropriate for drawing causal inferences from complex observational and randomized […]

2017 Federal Statistical Research Data Center Annual Conference

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

The California Census Research Data Center (CCRDC) at University of California Los Angeles invites proposals to present papers and posters at the 2017 Federal Statistical Research Data Center Annual Conference. We also will consider proposals for workshops and panel discussions.

2017-2018 CCPR Welcome and Introductions

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

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

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session I: Planning an NIH grant proposal

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

Grant Writing Workshop Series:
The workshop will include an overview of the basics, including NIH funding mechanisms, types of grant programs (we will focus on the R series with some discussion of K series), finding a funding opportunity (FOA): Parent Announcements, Program Announcements (PAs) vs. Request for Applications (RFAs) Administrative and other supplements Roles on a grant (PI, Co-PI, Co-Investigator, others), the process of preparing NIH proposals, identifying NIH institute (NIH matchmaker), working with NIH staff, due dates and the application to funding timeline, applications & resubmissions.

Roland Rau, University of Rostock

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

"The challenges of estimating mortality in small areas -- using German counties as a case study"

Abstract: We develop and analyze Bayesian models that produce good estimates of complete mortality schedules for small areas, even when the expected number of deaths is very small. The models also provide estimates of uncertainty about local mortality schedules. The TOPALS relational model is the primary building block, used to model age-specific mortality rates within each small area. TOPALS models produce estimates for single-year ages from a small number of local parameters. We experiment with Bayesian models for smoothing and ‘borrowing’ mortality information across space, using two alternative specifications. First we test a Bayesian model with conditional autoregressive (CAR) priors for TOPALS parameters. CAR priors assign higher probability to parameters that are similar across adjacent areas, thus emphasizing spatial smoothness in estimated rates. Second, we test a hierarchical Bayesian model, which assigns higher probability to parameters that are similar for locations that are close in terms of political geography.

Workshop: Useful R 4 Stata Users Brown Bag

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

"R 4 Stata Users"

This workshop is a brown bag forum. Participants are encouraged to bring in tangible questions they wish to explore using R. To serve as a background road map, the instructor will provide an abbreviated sample of what he thinks are the most useful features of R. However, the goal is to have participants ask questions that the collective group can figure out using R. Any R question is fair game, for example: questions about fundamental R concepts or even questions about how to run Stata-equivalent R commands. Participants will be provided access to Rstudio, so please bring a laptop.

This CCPR brown-bag is intended to be an open forum that complements the 3 great resources below. Please see the resources, especially the first one.

1) 10 minute demo: interactive call–response slideshow of R basics
http://tryr.codeschool.com/

2) Worked out examples from a UCLA IDRE workshop on R concepts
https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/r/seminars/intro/

3) R 4 Data Science e-book
http://r4ds.had.co.nz/