California Center for Population Research

Abigail Weitzman, University of Texas, Austin "Threat Evasive Migration: A Population Perspective"
2025-04-16 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
Biography: Dr. Weitzman is a sociologist and demographer whose research explores two interrelated questions: How do expectations, desires, and threats influence the timing and nature of important events in people’s lives, cumulatively shaping demographic patterns and population dynamics? And, reciprocally, how do shifting demographic circumstances influence aspirations, perceived threats, and behaviors in ways that determine individuals’ health outcomes and life trajectories? Her most recent work takes up these questions in the context of migration, considering how individuals and families navigate evolving threats and opportunities in both countries of origin and reception.

Threat Evasive Migration: A Population Perspective

Abstract: Approximately 14 million refugees and other migrants in need of international protection (MNP) live in the Western hemisphere, approximately 83% of whom reside in Latin America or the Caribbean. Demographers know surprisingly little about this population or about threat evasive migration more generally, e.g. migration undertaken to escape threats to survival. Moreover, most research on MNP is concentrated among refugees and asylum-seekers, which has allowed states’ legal categorization of migrants to dictate whose experiences we understand. Drawing on six years of fieldwork with MNP in Costa Rica, I highlight the need to move away from conventional sampling approaches; discuss network-based sampling methods as an alternative; and illustrate how broadening the lens beyond asylum-seekers provides new insights into violence-related selection processes.

Bagel Hour
2025-04-14 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-04-07 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-03-31 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-03-10 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-03-03 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-02-24 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-02-10 10:00 - 11:00, 2025-02-03 10:00 - 11:00 (America/Los_Angeles) and 6 more dates | CCPR Break Room
Join CCPR affiliates for bagels from Noah’s Bagels and get to know one another in a casual setting.
Bagels are served in the CCPR Break Room.

PAA Reception
2025-04-11 18:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Marriott Marquis, Beerlab, 901 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC, United States
CCPR will be hosting a joint reception with Michigan, Washington, Brown and Wisconsin-Madison at PAA this year. The reception will take place on Friday, April 11, from 6-8:30 pm EST. Please join us!

Population Association of America 2025 Annual Meeting @ Washington D.C.
2025-04-10 - 2025-04-13

Student Practice Talks (PAA)
2025-04-02 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles)

Eliana La Ferrara, Harvard Kennedy School, "Changing Harmful Norms through Information and Coordination: Experimental Evidence from Somalia"
2025-03-05 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Eliana La Ferrara is Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She received a PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1999. Prior to joining HKS, she was the Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at Bocconi University, Milan, where she founded and directed the Laboratory for Effective Anti-poverty Policies (LEAP). She is a Past President of the Econometric Society, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, and International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also NBER Research Associate, Director of Development Economics at CEPR, and J-PAL Affiliate. She was president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) in 2016-2019 and of the European Economic Association in 2018. She is the recipient of the 2020 Birgit Grodal Award. Her research focuses on Development Economics and Political Economics, particularly on the role of social factors in economic development. She has studied ethnic diversity, stereotypes, kin structure and social norms, and the effects of television on social outcomes. She has also investigated political constraints to development, with particular focus on violent conflict in Africa. Her work has been published in leading economic journals.
Changing Harmful Norms through Information and Coordination: Experimental Evidence from Somalia
Abstract: We study the role of biased beliefs and coordination failures in perpetuating the norm of female genital cutting (FGC) in Somalia, where 98% of women are cut. We experimentally evaluate three interventions to decrease the prevalence of infibulation, the most harmful type of FGC: (i) correcting misperceptions about support for the practice; (ii) public declarations of one’s willingness to abandon it; and (iii) a combination of the two. We find that on average community members overestimate others’ support for infibulation. Correcting this misperception reduces the probability of infibulation by 40% two years after the intervention. Over the same time horizon, this leads to an increase in the `intermediate’ type of FGC (Sunna). When taking into account parents’ future plans for younger, uncut daughters, the misperception treatment no longer results in higher Sunna rates, increasing instead the likelihood that parents plan not to cut. The public declaration treatment does not reduce infibulation, except in communities where participants had high priors about community support for abandoning the practice. The combined treatment yields similar but insignificant results. Our findings point to the importance of correcting biased beliefs when designing coordination interventions to eradicate harmful norms.

An audio recording of Eliana La Ferrara’s presentation may be accessed here.

Workshop: Paul Lillig, UCLA, "OHRPP and Research at UCLA - A Brief Overview of IRB Function and Responsibilities"
2025-02-26 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240 Public Affairs Bldg
Join us for a CCPR workshop on IRB/Human Subject requirements and procedures at UCLA. This event is tailored for graduate students and faculty affiliates; covering the criteria for IRB approval, the submission process for IRB review, and how to determine if IRB review or certification of exemption is required for your research. The workshop will also include a Q&A to address any specific questions or concerns you may have.

An audio recording of Paul Lillig’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Sarah Brayne, Stanford University, "Living and Dying in the Shadow of Mass Incarceration"
2025-02-19 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Sarah Brayne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. In her work, she uses qualitative and quantitative methods to understand whether and how data-intensive surveillance shapes individual trajectories and population-level disparities. Her first book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, draws on ethnographic research within the Los Angeles Police Department to understand the social implications of law enforcement’s use of predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies.
Current projects investigate whether and how exposure to the criminal legal system shapes racial and ethnic disparities in health, aging, and mortality; how social media data is used in the criminal legal process; and role of surveillance in forced migration.
Prior to joining the faculty at Stanford, Professor Brayne taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where she co-founded the Texas Prison Education Initiative. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of British Columbia, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University, and completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research.

Living and Dying in the Shadow of Mass Incarceration

Abstract: In the United States, racial disparities in life expectancy are well-documented. However, the role of incarceration is largely absent from this research. This gap is striking, given the disproportionate exposure to incarceration among Black men. In this talk, I use administrative and vital statistics data to understand the impact of incarceration on racial disparities in life expectancy. This research highlights the complex interplay between incarceration and health, ultimately arguing there is a critical need for analyses of data on incarceration in population research.

Robert Fairlie, University of California, Los Angeles, "Affirmative Action, Faculty Productivity and Caste Interactions: Evidence from Engineering Colleges in India"
2025-02-12 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Fairlie is a Distinguished Professor at UCLA. He is an Economist and Chair of the Department of Public Policy. He is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He studies a wide range of topics including entrepreneurship, education, labor, racial, gender and caste inequality, information technology, immigration, health, and development. He received a Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and B.A. with honors from Stanford University, and has held full-time or visiting positions at UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Yale University, UC Berkeley, and Australian National University. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Academies, and Russell Sage Foundation as well as numerous government agencies and foundations, and has testified in front of the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Department of Treasury, and the California State Assembly.
Affirmative Action, Faculty Productivity and Caste Interactions: Evidence from Engineering Colleges in India
Abstract: Affirmative action programs are often criticized because of concerns over lower worker productivity. In India, colleges are required to reserve 50 percent of faculty hires from lower caste groups. We collect and analyze data from Indian engineering colleges, some of which randomly assign students to classrooms. We find that reservation category faculty have lower education levels, professorial ranks and experience than general category faculty. Yet, we find no evidence that reservation category faculty provide lower quality instruction or have lower research or administrative productivity. Examining heterogeneity in instructional quality, we also find no evidence of positive reservation category “teacher-like-me” effects.

An audio recording of Robert Farilie’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Workshop: Yiqing Xu, Stanford University, "Factorial Difference-in-Differences"
2025-02-05 12:00 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Dr. Xu’s primary research covers political methodology, Chinese politics, and their intersection. He received a PhD in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016), an MA in Economics from China Center for Economic Research at Peking University (2010) and a BA in Economics from Fudan University (2007). His work has appeared in leading political science journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis. He has won several professional awards, including the John T. Williams Dissertation Prize from the Society for Political Methodology, the Best Article Award from American Journal of Political Science in 2016, and the Miller Prize (2018, 2020) for the best work appearing in Political Analysis the preceding year. In 2024, he was honored with the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society of Political Methodology and received an honorable mention for the Becky Morton and Tom Carsey Excellence in Mentoring Award. That same year, interflex, R and Stata packages he developed with his team, won the Society’s Best Statistical Software Award.
Factorial Difference-in-Differences
Abstract: In many panel data settings, researchers apply the difference-in-differences (DID) estimator, exploiting cross-sectional variation in a baseline factor and temporal variation in exposure to an event affecting all units. However, the exact estimand is often unspecified and the justification for this method remains unclear. This paper formalizes this empirical approach, which we term factorial DID (FDID), as a research design including its data structure, estimands, and identifying assumptions. We frame it as a factorial design with two factors—the baseline factor G and exposure level Z, and define effect modification and causal moderation as the associative and causal effects of G on the effect of Z, respectively. We show that under standard assumptions, including no anticipation and parallel trends, the DID estimator identifies effect modification but not causal moderation. To identify the latter, we propose an additional factorial parallel trends assumption. Moreover, we reconcile canonical DID as a special case of FDID with an additional exclusion restriction and link causal moderation to G’s conditional effect with another exclusion restriction. We extend our framework to conditionally valid assumptions, clarify regression-based approaches, and illustrate our findings with an empirical example. We offer practical recommendations for FDID applications.

Bear Force One Launch Party
2025-01-29 16:30 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240 Public Affairs Bldg
Bear Force One is CCPR’s newest, large scale computing resource, available for all our affiliates!
As the refresh solution to our current TS2 service, Bear Force One offers enhanced capabilities designed to support your research with:

– Advanced computing power: A remote-hosted, clustered offering that features high-performance processors and plenty of memory.

– Comprehensive software tooling: A catalog of statistical analysis and data science tools, including Stata, SAS, R/RStudio, and other productivity applications tailored to your needs.

– Seamless accessibility: A service available anytime, anywhere, ensuring smooth operations without relying on your local devices.

Additionally, we’re introducing the DataDen, an external, mountable storage solution here at CCPR! The DataDen is built with advanced security features and redundancy to safeguard your data while minimizing the risk of loss.

We will outline the benefits of using our new resource and how to gain access. Please join us for this amazing event as there will be food, games, and merchandise to give!

Sherry Glied, New York University Wagner School, "Who Really Pays for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance? General Reflections and New Evidence from the ACA Dependent Coverage Mandate"
2025-01-29 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Sherry Glied, an economist, is Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. From 2010-2012, Glied served as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. She served as Senior Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton. In 2016-2017, she served on the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. She is currently chairing New York Governor Hochul’s Commission on the Future of Health Care. Glied is a member of the Board of Directors of Geisinger, the Milbank Fund, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Who Really Pays for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance? General Reflections and New Evidence from the ACA Dependent Coverage Mandate
Abstract: The incidence of employer-provided health insurance within firms is important for the design of the tax treatment of employer-based coverage and for understanding the evolving structure of the US labor market. Economic theory and empirical studies conclude that the cost of voluntary employer-sponsored health insurance falls on employees as a group. However, the distribution of overall and subsidy incidence and the mechanism through which incidence occurs have not been well-established.

This talk will provide new evidence (joint with Hansoo Ko) on incidence by examining the dependent coverage mandate in the ACA, which mandates that adult children to age 26 may remain on their parents’ policies. We confirm the overall incidence of the mandate and then consider three situations in which the benefits of this new coverage to an employee differ from the costs to an employer. I will then relate this evidence to the broader empirical literature and policy.

An audio recording of Sherry Glied’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Marissa Thompson, Columbia University "They have Black in their blood: Exploring how genetic ancestry tests affect racial appraisals and classifications"
2025-01-22 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Marissa Thompson is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial and socioeconomic inequality, with an emphasis on understanding the role of education in shaping disparate outcomes over the life-course. Marissa’s current research investigates, for example, parental preferences regarding school segregation, the causal effects of first-dollar scholarship policies on college access, and the role of genetic ancestry tests in racial boundary-making processes. She employs a range of methods in her work, including quantitative methods, survey experiments, and both computational and qualitative analyses of text data.

“They have Black in their blood”: Exploring how genetic ancestry tests affect racial appraisals and classifications

Abstract: How do genetic ancestry tests (GATs) affect Black Americans’ beliefs about when others should – or should not – identify as Black? Using two survey experiments that integrate causal inference with computational text analysis, we disentangle the effects of GAT results, setting, and prior identification on racial classifications and evaluations. We find that respondents have an increased likelihood of approving of a person’s decision to identify as Black and of classifying them as Black if that person has higher levels of GAT-measured Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Further, we identify meaningful gaps between the responses made by respondents themselves and their perception of the typical response made by members of their own racial group; these patterns are consistent with broad pluralistic ignorance towards the social rules governing racial classifications and evaluations. Finally, free text responses reveal a range of strategies used in evaluations. We find that the aspects that affect approval and evaluations differ from those that affect classifications; respondents selectively integrate different sources of information, including GAT results, via a dual classification and evaluation process which we term racial contextualism.

An audio recording of Marissa Thompson’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Sarah Miller, University of Michigan, "Does Income Affect Health? Evidence from the OpenResearch Unconditional Income Study"
2024-12-04 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Sarah Miller is an associate professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. Dr. Miller’s research interests are in health economics and, in particular, the short-term and long-term effects of public policies that expand health insurance coverage, and in the effects of income and other social program support on health and well-being. In 2022, Dr. Miller was awarded the ASHEcon Medal, awarded by the American Society of Health Economists to an economist aged 40 or younger who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics. She is also a co-editor for the Journal of Public Economics. Her work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics, among other journals, and has been cited in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Economic Report of the President.
Does Income Affect Health? Evidence from the OpenResearch Unconditional Income Study
Abstract: Does income affect health? We randomized 1,000 low-income adults in the United States to receive $1,000 per month for three years, with 2,000 control participants receiving $50 per month. The transfer generated large but short-lived improvements in stress and food security, increased hospital and emergency department use, and increased medical spending by about $20 per month. However, we find a precise null effect of the transfer on several measures of health, including biomarkers derived from blood draws. We also find precise null effects on access to health care, physical activity, sleep, and measures related to preventive care and health behavior.

A recording of Sarah Miller’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Workshop: Grant Writing
2024-11-20 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Featuring Martha Bailey, Gilbert Gee, Naomi Sugie, and Janet Stein

A recording of this workshop may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Lisa Dettling, Federal Reserve Board, “Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the Baby Boom?”
2024-11-13 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Lisa Dettling is a Principal Economist in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, where she is part of the team that forecasts the economic effects of fiscal policy (taxes, transfers, and government spending). She is currently on leave from the Board and visiting CCPR this fall. Lisa’s academic research is in labor and public economics, with a focus on domestic policy issues relating to families and household financial well-being. Her work has appeared in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review and the Review of Economic Studies. Lisa obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland in 2013, and B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from The Ohio State University in 2007.
“Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the Baby Boom?”
Abstract: This paper proposes that the adoption of the modern US mortgage (i.e., low down payment, long-term, and fixed-rate)–led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veteran’s Administration (VA) loan insurance programs—set the stage for the mid-twentieth century US baby boom by dramatically raising rates of home ownership for young families. Using newly digitized data on FHA- and VA- backed loan issuance and births by state-year, and a novel instrumental variables strategy that isolates supply-side variation in loan issuance, we find that the FHA/VA mortgage insurance programs led to 3 million additional births from 1935-1957, roughly 10 percent of the excess births in the baby boom. Aggregate effects mask differences by group — we find no effects of FHA/VA lending on births for Black women, consistent with well-documented racial discrimination in these programs. Our results highlight the importance of housing affordability for fertility decisions.

Susan Cassels, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Patterns of Sexual Minority Men's Lifestyle and Healthcare Related Activity Spaces in Los Angeles"
2024-11-06 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Dr. Susan Cassels is a Professor in the Department of Geography at UCSB, and the Director of the Broom Center for Demography. She studies and teaches topics related to health geography, demography, and infectious disease epidemiology. The central focus of her research is on geographic mobility, sexual health, and HIV prevention. Her current research is on geo-social determinants of HIV transmission dynamics – or in other words how and why certain people are more susceptible to HIV, and how, where, and why HIV spreads to other people. With colleagues at UCLA, she has implemented a survey on activity spaces of sexual minority men in LA to examine patterns of geo-spatial exposures, and whether places of exposure differ by activity. Recently, she has published a couple of qualitative papers as well. Current qualitative work is aimed to understand how social networks and geographic environments shape substance use behaviors.
Patterns of Sexual Minority Men’s Lifestyle and Healthcare Related Activity Spaces in Los Angeles
Abstract: For sexual minority men (SMM), geo-social exposures in residential and non-residential places are important to consider for health, as home, social, sexual, substance use, and healthcare-related locations may be different. Using data from 219 Black and Hispanic SMM within Los Angeles County, we identify, describe, and assess overlap of both lifestyle and healthcare-related activity space clusters, or “hotspots.” Lifestyle activity space hotspots are spatially patterned by socio-demographic characteristics, primarily along race and ethnic categories. Hispanic individuals’ lifestyle locations were less likely to be clustered, while the opposite was true for Black individuals. Interestingly, healthcare-related hotspots are not significantly associated with any socio-demographic features. Hotspot congruence was higher than we hypothesized, as hotspots of residential locations contained the majority of sex hotspots and substance use hotspots. Our work demonstrates a valid method for reliably measuring behaviors of HIV, sex, and substance use and identifying spatial patterns in geographic space.

An audio recording of Dr. Cassels’ presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.
