California Center for Population Research

Jake Bowers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2018-03-13 14:00 - 15:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Franz Hall 2258A
The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents:
Rules of Engagement in Evidence-Informed Policy: Practices and Norms of Statistical Science in Government

Collaboration between statistical scientists (data scientists, behavioral and social scientists, statisticians) and policy makers promises to improve government and the lives of the public. And the data and design challenges arising from governments offer academics new chances to improve our understanding of both extant methods and behavioral and social science theory. However, the practices that ensure the integrity of statistical work in the academy — such as transparent sharing of data and code — do not translate neatly or directly into work with governmental data and for policy ends. This paper proposes a set of practices and norms that academics and practitioners can agree on before launching a partnership so that science can advance and the public can be protected while policy can be improved. This work is at an early stage. The aim is a checklist or statement of principles or memo of understanding that can be a template for the wide variety of ways that statistical scientists collaborate with governmental actors.

Speaker:
Jake Bowers, Associate Professor at University of Illinois and Fellow of the Office of Evaluation Sciences

Fernando Riosmena, University of Colorado
2018-03-07 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“A re-appraisal of thinking on and the empirical evaluation of migration theories”
Abstract: Over the last quarter Century, there has been considerable efforts to systematize knowledge on and empirically test the drivers of population mobility around a set of eight theories that either explain the initiation or continuation of international labor migration flows. In this presentation, I provide a reflection aimed at furthering theoretical development and empirical testing of these theories. I do so by: (1) providing more specific guidance on how the different theories’ overlapping scales of influence interrelate more specifically than examined in prior work; (2) arguing for a more complete formulation of some of these theories to better explain contemporary immigration flows; and (3) discussing whether/how these theories can help bridge the understanding of the “drivers” of internal vs. international migration, and of labor vs. other kinds of mobility, including some forms of forced displacement. Throughout, I also discuss how the quantitative testing of these theories has fallen into pitfalls of both thinking measurement, which have likely led to a misattribution of the relative importance of some theories, suggesting some refinements on the empirical validation of and the more general use of these theories in guiding empirical analysis going forward.
Access Podcast Here
Co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration and the Center for Mexican Studies
More on Prof. Riosmena

Wendy Manning, Bowling Green State University
2018-02-28 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Boomer and Millennial Young Adulthood Relationships: A Demographic Perspective“
Abstract: Baby Boomers were at the forefront of many changes in young adult relationship and family experiences. Today a new cohort, Millennials, outnumber Boomers and have redefined young adulthood. Dr. Manning will contrast the relationship experiences of young adult Boomers and Millennials. She will share new findings about recent patterns and trends in the formation and stability of young adult relationships. Concluding comments will focus on challenges and opportunities for research on young adults in the United States.
Bio: Wendy D. Manning, Ph.D., Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research, Co-Director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University
*Co-sponsored with The Family Working Group at UCLA
More on Prof. Manning

Yu Xie, Princeton
2018-02-21 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Heterogeneous Causal Effects: A Propensity Score Approach “
Abstract: Heterogeneity is ubiquitous in social science. Individuals differ not only in background characteristics, but also in how they respond to a particular treatment. In this presentation, Yu Xie argues that a useful approach to studying heterogeneous causal effects is through the use of the propensity score. He demonstrates the use of the propensity score approach in three scenarios: when ignorability is true, when treatment is randomly assigned, and when ignorability is not true but there are valid instrumental variables.

More on Prof. Xie

Graduate Student Workshop on Refugee Movements and Refugee Policy
2018-02-15 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Organizer: Roger Waldinger
February 15, 2018
4240 Public Affairs Building
The UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration invites graduate student applicants for an-all day workshop on Refugee Movements and Refugee Policy. Immediately preceding a one day conference on the same topic, the workshop is designed to take advantage of the presence of an international and interdisciplinary group of refugee scholars to provide graduate-level instruction on this essential topic, but one that is rarely addressed by courses offered on our campus.

Joscha Legewie, Yale University
2018-02-14 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Policing and the Educational Performance of Minority Youth”
Abstract: How does the expansion of police presence in poor urban communities affect educational outcomes? Exploiting a quasi-experimental design from New York City, we present causal evidence of the impact of aggressive, zero-tolerance policing on the educational performance of minority youth. Under Operation Impact, the New York Police Department (NYPD) saturated high crime areas with additional police officers with the mission to engage in aggressive order maintenance policing. We used administrative data from about 680,000 adolescents aged 10 to 14 and exploited quasi-random variation in the relative timing of police surges and the date of standardized exams among children in the same neighborhood. Exposure to police surges significantly reduced test scores for African-American boys. The size of the effect increases with age but there is no discernible effect for African-American girls and Hispanics. Aggressive policing can thus lower the educational performance of African-American youth and perpetuate the racial achievement gap.
More on Prof. Legewie

Ethical Issues in Public Presentations
2018-02-07 13:30 - 14:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Oftentimes in public presentations, from lectures to seminars to conference presentations, sensitive topics arise. These may involve race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, or any number of additional topics. We will have an open forum discussion of examples of these types of topics arising, and how well speakers address them. What are some best practices for discussing sensitive topics? What are some examples of practices you would like to avoid in your own presentations?

Randall Kuhn, UC Los Angeles
2018-02-07 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“A Large-Scale Survey of International Migrants from Rural Bangladesh: Longitudinal Evidence on Migration Costs, Earnings and Health”
Abstract: Popular attention has focused on the harsh conditions facing overseas guest workers from countries such as Bangladesh to the states of the Persian Gulf, with the assumption of negative health consequences. In contrast, the global empirical literature on migrant health finds generally positive health outcomes for migrants relative to those left-behind, due in large part to self-selection. Yet most such studies match separate datasets from sending and destination country rather than using a binational panel survey. Few focus on guest workers or migrants to non-OECD destinations. The Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS) is a binational panel survey that follows a representative sample of a rural area of Bangladesh from 1996-7 to 2012-4. Between survey rounds, one quarter of young adult males moved outside the country (most to the Persian Gulf), with one-third migrating internally. All out-migrants were followed, including festival and phone interviews with overseas migrants. MHSS2 achieved a 92% reinterview rate, including 87% of overseas migrants. This paper provides preliminary assessment of data quality for phone and festival interviews, and measures the effects of migrant status (international, internal), return migrant and country of destination on livelihoods, physical health and mental health. Regression estimates account for the potential confounding effects of current and past socioeconomic characteristics of the migrant, his parents, family and community using data back to 1974. Propensity score estimates account for the effects of self-selection into migration, while bounding exercises address the potential effects of differential inter-survey mortality.
Access Podcast Here
More on Prof. Kuhn

Per Block, ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)
2018-02-06 14:00 - 2021-04-23 17:00
The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents:
Modelling Mobility Tables as Weighted Networks
Contemporary research on occupational mobility, i.e. how people move between jobs, tends to view mobility as being mostly determined by individual and occupational characteristics. These studies focus on people’s sex, ethnicity, age, education or class origin and how they get access to jobs of different wages, working conditions, desirability, skill profiles and job security. Consequently, observations in occupational mobility tables are understood as independent of one another, which allows the use of a variety of well-developed statistical models. As opposed to these “classical” approaches focussed on individual and occupational characteristics, I am interested in modelling and understanding endogenously emerging patterns in occupational mobility tables. These emergent patterns arise from the social embedding of occupational choices, when occupational transitions of different individuals influence each other. To analyse these emergent patterns, I conceptualise a disaggregated mobility table as a network in which occupations are the nodes and connections are made of individuals transitioning between occupations.

In this paper, I present a statistical model to analyse these weighted mobility networks. The approach to modelling mobility as an interdependent system is inspired by the exponential random graph model (ERGM); however, some differences arise from ties being weighted as well as from specific constraints of mobility tables. The model is applied to data on intra-generational mobility to analyse the interdependent transitions of men and women through the labour market, as well as to understanding the extent to which clustering in mobility can be modelled by exogenously defined social classes or through endogenous structures.

Per Block, ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)
site

Amparo González Ferrer, Spanish Scientific Research Council
2018-02-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 10383
“Intergenerational Relationships among Latino Immigrant Families in Spain: Conflict and Emotional Intimacy”
*Co-sponsored with The Center for the Study of International Migration
Abstract: Relationships with parents have been identified as a major factor in shaping adolescents’ well-being and cognitive development. Compared to adolescents in native families, immigrant children face multiple stressors associated with international migration that may cause the relationship with their parents to be more conflictive or emotionally distant. In this paper, we compare the levels of mother-child conflict and emotional intimacy among Latino immigrant and Spanish native families living in Spain. Our analysis shows that Latino adolescents do not describe the relationship with their mothers as more conflictive than natives do. However, they report more emotional distance with their mothers than native adolescents. This differential with natives cannot be fully attributed to migration-related factors like physical separation from parents due to staggered family migration, to the lower life satisfaction of Latino mothers’ in their new destination or to an acculturation gap between mother and child. However, the fact that immigrant mothers spend less time doing activities with their children, probably due to their harder working conditions, explains part of the differential in emotional intimacy with native families. Finally, our analyses clearly establish an equally negative relationship between conflict and emotional intimacy for both native and Latino immigrant families.

Cynthia Feliciano, UC Irvine
2018-01-31 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“How Multiracial Identities and Racial Classification Shape Latinos’ Dating Preferences“
Abstract:Understanding how life experiences vary by different dimensions of race may help clarify the growing Latino population’s place in the U.S. racial structure. This study examines how self-identifying with more than one racial group and racial classification relate to racial dating choices among Latinos. Analyses of data from online dating profiles reveal divergent patterns in stated racial preferences among Latinos depending upon whether and how they also identify with other racial groups. Latinos who identify as White express racial preferences that are more similar to Whites than to monoracial Latinos, while the preferences of Black-identified Latinos are more similar to Blacks, consistent with Whitening and Black exceptionalism theories. However, regardless of racial self-identity, Latino online daters vary in their exclusion of Whites depending upon how they are racially classified by others. These findings suggest that Latinos’ racial preferences are influenced by the existing racial structure and that Latinos contribute to maintaining the racial hierarchy through their dating choices. In addition, the findings suggest multiple assimilation trajectories within this diverse population.
*Co-Sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration
More on Prof. Feliciano

Rob Warren, University of Minnesota
2018-01-24 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“When Should Researchers Use Inferential Statistics When Analyzing Data on Full Populations?“
Abstract: Many researchers uncritically use inferential statistical procedures (e.g., hypothesis tests) when analyzing complete population data—a situation in which inference may seem unnecessary. We begin by reviewing and analyzing the most common rationales for employing inferential procedures when analyzing full population data. Two common rationales—having to do with handling missing data and generalizing results to other times and/or places—either lack merit or amount to analyzing sample (not population) data. Whether it is appropriate to use inferential procedures depends on whether researchers are analyzing sample or population data and on whether they seek to make causal or descriptive claims. When doing descriptive research, the distinction between sample and population data is paramount: Inferential statistics should only be used to analyze sample data (to account for sampling variability) and never to analyze population data. When doing causal research, the distinction between sample data and population data is unimportant: Inferential procedures can and should always be used to distinguish (for example) robust associations from those that may have come about by chance alone. Crucially, using inferential procedures to analyze population data to make descriptive claims can lead to incorrect substantive conclusions—especially when population sizes and/or effect sizes are small.
*Co-sponsored with the Center for Social Statistics
More on Prof. Warren
Access Podcast here

Chenoa Flippen, University of Pennsylvania
2018-01-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 10383
“The Uphill Climb: A Transnational Perspective on Wealth Accumulation among Latino Immigrants in Durham, NC”
Abstract: Wealth accumulation is a key dimension of ethno-racial stratification, and, among immigrants, an important indicator of incorporation. Dramatically low assets among immigrant Latinos is thus a pressing concern, necessitating a better understanding of the social forces that shape wealth assimilation. Drawing on a survey of Latino immigrants in Durham, NC, I argue for the importance of a transnational perspective on wealth for immigrant populations. Nationally representative surveys designed to assess inequality among the general population generally lack information on wealth held abroad, which accounts for the lion’s share of assets held by immigrants in our sample. Likewise, these data sources rarely have information on factors salient to immigrants, particularly legal status and informal employment. Finally, I show that the socio-demographic characteristics central to life-cycle wealth models operate in different ways for U.S. and foreign assets, and for men and women. For instance, while household earnings and duration of Durham residence are associated with greater U.S. assets among Durham’s Latino migrants, they fail to predict wealth held abroad. Likewise, low educational attainment and informal employment are associated with lower U.S., but not foreign, wealth. Instead, the key predictors of wealth abroad relate to family structure. I further document structural barriers to immigrant Latino wealth accumulation, such as employment marginality and lack of access to mainstream financial institutions.
*Co-Sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration
More on Prof. Flippen

Diversion in the Criminal Justice System: Regression Discontinuity Evidence on Court Deferrals: Kevin Schnepel, University of Sydney, School of Economics
2018-01-18 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Kevin Schnepel, University of Sydney, School of Economics
The historically unprecedented size of the U.S. criminal justice system has necessitated the development of diversion programs to reduce caseloads as a cost containment strategy. Court deferrals, which allow felony defendants to avoid formal convictions through probation, are one example. Using two discontinuities in deferral rates in Harris County, Texas, separated by 13 years, we find consistent evidence that diversion reduces reoffending and unemployment among first-time felony defendants. Similar benefits are not observed for repeat offenders suggesting felony record stigma as a key mechanism. Young, African American men drive the total effect, a pattern consistent with over-targeting by law enforcement.

Doug Massey, Princeton University
2018-01-10 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Train Wreck: US Immigration and Border Policy 1965-2010”
Abstract: Despite the massive increase in border enforcement after 1986, undocumented population growth did not decrease, but rose. In this talk I undertake a systematic analysis of border enforcement as a policy for immigration control. Empirical results explain not only why it failed, but how and why it backfired. In the end, the militarization of the border did not increase the probability of apprehension at the border or reduce the likelihood of unauthorized entry; but it did dramatically change the geography of border crossing, increase the costs of undocumented migration, and elevate the physical risks of border crossing. Ironically, these trends had no effect on the likelihood of undocumented departure for the United States, but instead reduced the probability undocumented returns back to Mexico, thereby increasing the net volume of undocumented migration and accelerating undocumented population growth.
Access Podcast Here
*Co-Sponsored with;
The Center for the Study of International Migration
The Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility Working Group
The Center for Mexican Studies
More on Prof. Massey

Nathaniel Osgood, University of Saskatchewan, "Using Smartphones and Wearables for Public Health Insight: A Hands-On Introduction"
2017-12-13 12:00 - 13:30 | CHS 61-269
Abstract: Acquisition of evidence-based understanding of human health behavior and exposure to environments forms a central focus of health research, and a critical prerequisite for effective health policy. The use of mobile devices to study health behavior via cross-linked sensor data and on-device self-reporting and crowdsourcing offer compelling advantages to complement traditional techniques. Data collected on such devices can be particularly powerful in supporting understanding of health behaviors in areas where accurate self-reporting is difficult, including nutritional intake, physical activity and sedentary behaviour, and exposures to physical and social environments. Through structured surveys and crowdsourcing mechanisms, such devices can further provide potent means of gaining insight into knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions in health areas. Finally, while little explored, some of the most powerful uses of such day lie in terms of understanding the particular causal pathways impacted by interventions. This hands-on talk will provide public health researchers and practitioners with a high-level introduction to the motivation, state-of-the-art in and tools for use of mobile data collection in public health. Topics touched on include elements of motivation, study design, behavioral ethics concerns and needs, data collection systems requiring low technical involvement, and analysis. Participants will be invited to experience a state-of-the-art and widely used mobile data collection system during the talk that illustrates many of the principles discussed.
Sponsored by The Department of Community Health Sciences along with the Center for Social Statistics and the California Center for Population Research

Nathaniel Osgood, University of Saskatchewan, "Dynamic modeling for health in the age of big data"
2017-12-12 14:00 - 15:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Abstract: Traditional approaches to public health concerns have conferred great advances in the duration and quality of life. Public health interventions – from improved sanitation efforts, to vaccination campaigns, to contact tracing and environmental regulations – have helped reduce common risks to health throughout many areas of the world. Unfortunately, while traditional methods from the health sciences have proven admirably suited for addressing traditional challenges, a troubling crop of complex health challenges confront the nation and the world, and threaten to stop – and even reverse the – rise in length and quality of life that many have taken for granted. Examples include multi-factorial problems such as obesity and obesity-related chronic disease, the spread of drug-resistant and rapidly mutating pathogens that evade control efforts, and “syndemics” of mutually reinforcing health conditions (such as Diabetes and TB; substance abuse, violence and HIV/AIDS; obesity & stress). Such challenges have proven troublingly policy resistant, with interventions being thwarted by “blowback” from the complex feedbacks involved, and attendant costs threaten to overwhelm health care systems. In the face of such challenges public health decision makers are increasingly supplementing their toolbox using “system science” techniques. Such methods – also widely known as “complex systems approaches” – provide a way to understand a system’s behavior as a whole and as more than the sum of its parts, and a means of anticipating and managing the behavior of a system in more judicious and proactive fashion. However, such approaches offer substantially greater insight and power when combined with rich data sources. Within this talk, we will highlight the great promise afforded by combining of Systems Science techniques and rich data sources, particularly emphasizing the role of cross-linking models with “big data” offering high volume, velocity, variety and veracity. Examples of such data include fine-grained temporal and spatial information collected by smartphone-based and wearable as well as building and municipal sensors, data from social media posts and search behavior, helpline calls, website accesses and rich cross-linked databases. Decision-oriented models grounded by such novel data sources can allow for articulated theory building regarding difficult-to-observe aspects of human behavior. Such models can also aid in informing evaluation of and judicious selection between sophisticated interventions to lessen the health burden of a wide variety of health conditions. Such models are particularly powerful when complemented by machine learning and computational statistics techniques that permit recurrent model regrounding in the newest evidence, and which allow a model to knit together holistic portrait of the system as a whole, and which support grounded investigation of between intervention strategies tradeoffs.
Sponsored by The Department of Community Health Sciences along with the Center for Social Statistics and the California Center for Population Research

Jessica Ho, USC
2017-11-29 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Contemporary Trends in American Mortality: International Comparisons and Emerging Challenges”
Abstract: The decades surrounding the turn of the 21st century have been a challenging period for American mortality. The United States is currently facing a large-scale opioid epidemic, and life expectancy barely increased between 2010 and 2015. This talk will cover various dimensions of contemporary trends in American mortality including the contribution of drug overdose to educational gradients in life expectancy, an analysis of the contemporary drug overdose epidemic in international perspective, and how the U.S.’s recent life expectancy stagnation has impacted its standing in international life expectancy rankings relative to other high-income countries.
More on Prof. Ho

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session VII: Regulatory Sections/ NIH grant application process at UCLA
2017-11-29 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The workshop will include an overview of human subjects/UCLA IRB preaward, data sharing plan, multiple PI plan and clinical trials, Office of Contract and Grant Administration (OCGA), S2S Grants/Cayuse, E-pass and electronic submission, eDGE disclosure, submission deadlines to OCGA, and interacting with eRA Commons.

Jennifer Skeem, UC Berkeley
2017-11-15 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“’What works’ for justice-involved people with mental illness”
Abstract: Each year, over 2 million people with serious mental illness are booked into U.S. jails. These people typically stay longer in jail than those without mental illness—and, upon release, are more likely to be reincarcerated. Today, over 300 counties have resolved to “step up” their efforts to reduce the number of people with mental illness in jail. In this presentation, I highlight research on “what works” to reduce re-offending among justice-involved people with mental illness. Programs must avoid the traditional assumption that mental illness is the direct cause of the problem, and linkage with psychiatric services is the solution. Evidence-based, cost-effective programs look beyond psychiatric explanations to address robust risk factors that are shared by people with- and without mental illness.
More on Prof. Skeem

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session VI: Preparing a Budget
2017-11-15 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The workshop will include an overview of personnel time on the project, salaries and benefits, other than personnel services (OTPS), consultants, equipment, patient care, alterations and renovations, consortium/contractual costs, budget justification, direct/modified direct/indirect costs.

Hadley Wickham, RStudio
2017-11-08 15:30 - 2021-04-23 17:00
The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents:
Programming data science with R & the tidyverse
Tidy evaluation is a new framework for non-standard evaluation that
will be used throughout tidyverse. In this talk, I’ll introduce you to
the problem that tidy eval solves, illustrated with examples of the
various approaches used in R. I’ll then explain the most important
components so that you can start writing your own functions instead of
copying and pasting tidyr and dplyr code. I’ll finish with a small
shiny app that shows how tidy eval is a natural fit for handling user
input.
Hadley Wickham, RStudio
http://hadley.nz/

Victoria Baranov, University of Melbourne
2017-11-08 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Mental health and women’s choices. Experimental evidence from a Randomized Control Trial. “
Abstract: We evaluate the long-term impact of treating maternal depression on women’s financial empowerment and parenting decisions by exploiting experimental variation induced by a cluster-randomized control trial which provided psychotherapy to perinatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. The trial, which is the largest psychotherapy trial in the world, was highly successful at reducing depression rates of mothers. We relocate mothers 6 years after the intervention concluded to evaluate the effects of the intervention on women’s financial empowerment, parental investments, fertility, as well as children development. We find that treating maternal depression increased women’s empowerment, particularly control over spending, both in the short-run and in the long-run. Consistent with the reports of increased control over spending, we find persistent effects of the intervention on both time- and monetary-intensive parental investment. We do not find any detectable effect on children development. The long-run treatment effects are concentrated among girls.
More on Prof. Baranov
Podcast Here

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session V
2017-11-08 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The workshop will include an overview of approach (2), statistical analysis and power.

Rodrigo Soares, Columbia University
2017-11-01 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Does Universalization of Health Work? Evidence from Health Systems Restructuring and Maternal and Child Health in Brazil“
Abstract: We investigate restructuring of the health system in Brazil motivated to operationalize universal health coverage. Using administrative data from multiple sources and an event study approach that exploits the staggered rollout of programmatic changes across municipalities, we find large reductions in maternal, foetal, neonatal and postneonatal mortality, and fertility. We document increased prenatal care visits, hospital births and other maternal and child hospitalization, which suggest that the survival gains were supply-driven. We find no improvement in the quality of births, which may be explained by endogenous shifts in the composition of births towards higher-risk births.
More on Prof. Soares
Podcast Here

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session IV
2017-11-01 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The workshop will include an overview of significance vs. innovation and approach.

Patrick Bajari, Vice President & Chief Economist Amazon
2017-10-30 15:30 - 17:00 | Korn Convocation Hall C314
UCLA Department of Economics
Master of Applied Economics Distinguished Speaker Series

Mark Kaplan, UCLA
2017-10-25 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Title: The Impact of Socioenvironmental Stressors on Alcohol-Linked Suicides: A Nationwide Postmortem Study”
Abstract: Not only is suicide a major public health problem, but also, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8,179 deaths and 273,206 years of potential life lost resulted from alcohol attributable suicides in 2006-10 (the latest years available). Since 2011, Professor Kaplan and his colleagues have worked with the National Violent Death Reporting System Restricted Access Database on two projects funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, focusing on acute alcohol use immediately prior to suicide. This presentation will show that nearly a third of suicide decedents nationwide were intoxicated at the time of death. Furthermore, Prof. Kaplan will describe the effects of the 2008-09 economic contraction and other adverse socioenvironmental conditions on rates of suicide involving acute alcohol intoxication.
More on Prof. Kaplan

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session III: Writing the scientific portions with the reviewers in mind
2017-10-25 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The workshop will include an overview of scored review criteria: Significance, investigators, innovation, approach, and environment, abstract, specific aims, biosketch/ personal statement, and environment.

Sander Greenland, UCLA Department of Epidemiology
2017-10-24 14:00 - 2021-04-23 17:00
The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents:
Statistical Significance and Discussion of the Challenges of Avoiding the Abuse of Statistical Methodology
Sander Greenland will offer his perspective on the paper, “Redefine Statistical Significance”, which was the topic of the previous week’s seminar. Also he will discuss the challenges of avoiding the abuse of statistical methodology.
Speaker:
Sander Greenland, Professor Emeritus, UCLA Department of Epidemiology
