California Center for Population Research

Workshop: Transparent Data Analysis Workflow
2017-10-20 12:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Instructor: Michael Tzen
PLEASE BRING A PERSONAL LAPTOP
Content: Researchers go through fundamental steps in a data analysis project. This workshop highlights key steps in a data analyst’s workflow and encourages transparency in each of the steps. Throughout this workshop, we go through hands on exercises that integrate: a transparency engine, obtaining federal API data, producing useful intermediate data structures, and sharing analysis results. We will use Jupyter notebook for literate coding and if time allows demonstrate the Rstudio environment for reproducible development.
Please RSVP Here:
https://goo.gl/forms/B7hMBod78Ecau8D22

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Tips on Giving Effective PAA Presentations, Job Talks, and the Like
2017-10-18 15:00 - 16:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Tips on Giving Effective PAA Presentations, Job Talks, and the Like: a Discussion Led by Prof. Donald J. (Don) Treiman
Click here to download the presentation.

David Chae, Auburn University
2017-10-18 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Getting Under the Skin: Socio-Psychobiological Pathways and Racial Disparities in Health.“
Abstract: Racism is physically embodied through social, behavioral, and psychobiological mechanisms. In this talk, David H. Chae, will discuss the utility of a social-ecological and developmental lens to examine how racism is biologically embedded. He will discuss his research on multiple levels of racism and the channels through which they compromise health throughout the lifecourse.
More on Prof. Chae

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session II: The NIH application review – What to expect? What to plan for?
2017-10-18 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The workshop will include an overview of the review process, Center for Scientific Review, identifying a peer review “study section”, and the peer review process.

Daniel Benjamin, USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research
2017-10-17 13:00 - 14:00
The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents:
Redefine Statistical Significance
Daniel Benjamin will discuss his paper (written by him and 71 other authors), “Redefine Statistical Significance”. The paper proposes that the default p-value threshold should be changed from 0.05 to 0.005.
The paper is available at this link.
Speaker:
Daniel Benjamin, Associate Professor, USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research

Workshop: Useful R 4 Stata Users Brown Bag
2017-10-13 12:00 - 13:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Instructor: Michael Tzen

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/

RVSP Here

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Roland Rau, University of Rostock
2017-10-11 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Title: 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.
More on Prof. Rau
Podcast Here

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session I: Planning an NIH grant proposal
2017-10-11 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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.

2017-2018 CCPR Welcome and Introductions
2017-10-04 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Please come join us to learn all about the California Center for Population Research!
Professors Judith Seltzer, Till von Wachter, and Jennie Brand will be presenting.
This will be the kick-off event for the start of the upcoming 2017-2018 CCPR Seminar Series.

2017 Federal Statistical Research Data Center Annual Conference
2017-09-13 08:00 - 2017-09-14 17:00 | 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.

James Robins, Harvard University
2017-06-09 12:00 - 13:00 | Room 33-105 CHS Building, 650 Charles E Young Drive South, Los Angeles, CA, 90095 , 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 studies with time-varying exposures or treatments. The new methods are to a large extent based on the estimation of the parameters of a new class of causal models – the structural nested models – using a new class of estimators – the G estimators.
Please RSVP: https://goo.gl/wScewQ
Speaker:
James Robins, Mitchell L. and Robin LaFoley Dong Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard University
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/james-robins/

Randall Akee, UCLA
2017-06-07 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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.

UCLA – HKUST International Symposium on Segregation & Neighborhood Effects
2017-06-06 09:00 - 17:15 | UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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.
3) International Experiences. Discussant: Min Zhou, UCLA

Fragile Families Challenge: Getting Started Workshop
2017-06-02 12:00 - 16:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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 that has been running for about 20 years. The Fragile Families research team has been following about 5,000 families—-collecting information about them and their environment at regular intervals—in order to understand how to improve the lives of disadvantaged children in the US.
*Co-Sponsored with the Center for Social Statistics, UCLA
Register now @ fragilefamilieschallenge.org, please specify you plan to attend the UCLA workshop

Research Ethics: The Use of Big Data
2017-05-31 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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, you may want to read:

http://bdes.datasociety.net/council-output/perspectives-on-big-data-ethics-and-society/
Kramer ADI, Guillory JE and Hancock JT (2014) Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(24): 8788–8790.
http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2016/06/03/okcupid-and-the-ethics-of-big-data-research/
Zimmer, M. Ethics Inf Technol (2010) 12: 313. doi:10.1007/s10676-010-9227-5

Panelists:

Christina Palmer, CGC, PhD

Professor, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and Genetics, UCLA

Irene PasquettoPh.D. Candidate, Department of Information Studies, UCLAGraduate Student Researcher, UCLA Center for Knowledge Infrastructures
Sean Young, PhD

Associate Professor
Executive Director
University of California Institute for Prediction Technology (UCIPT)
Department of Family Medicine, UCLA

Maggie R. Jones, United States Census Bureau
2017-05-25 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Refund Anticipation Products and the Improper Payment of the EITC”
*Co-Sponsored with Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar Series UCLA
More on Dr. Jones

Shahryar Minhas, Duke University
2017-05-24 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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 actors; (2) the impact of armed groups on violence as they enter or exit the conflict network; and (3) the ability of civilians to influence the strategic interactions of armed groups. Using ACLED event data on Nigeria, we apply a novel network-based approach to predict the evolution of intrastate conflict dynamics. Our network approach yields insights about the effects of civilian victimization and key actors entering the conflict. Attacks against civilians lead groups to both be more violent, and to become the targets of attacks in subsequent periods. Boko Haram’s entrance into the civil war leads to an increase in violence even in unrelated dyads. Further, our approach significantly outperforms more traditional dyad-group approaches at predicting the incidence of conflict.

Speaker:
Shahryar Minha, Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke University
Assistant Professor, Michigan State University
Department of Political Science and the Social Science Data Analytics Program (SSDA)
http://s7minhas.com/

Analysis of Complex Surveys using R and Stata
2017-05-19 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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 the survey design, impute any missing data, and analyze the survey outcomes of interest. We will discuss how our downstream “analysis” steps are related to initial operational “design” choices made by the survey data provider.
Note:
Please bring your own laptop.
For R, we will use instantaneous Jupyter notebooks (no install required)
For Stata, please have a TS1 account or your own copy of Stata
(for software assistance, contact emoss@ccpr.ucla.edu)

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Marcella Alsan, Stanford University
2017-05-17 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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.
More on Prof. Alsan
Podcast Here

Jere R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania
2017-05-10 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Co-sponsored with the Applied Group in the Department of Economics
“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.

More on Prof. Behrman
Podcast Here

Political Sociology and the Global South Student Conference: Interdisciplinary Insights from the Global South
2017-05-05 08:00 - 17:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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 welcome submissions from graduate students across the UCLA campus.

Mark Duggan, Stanford University
2017-05-03 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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.
More on Prof. Duggan
Podcast Here

West Coast Experiments Conference, UCLA 2017
2017-04-23 08:00 - 2017-04-25 17:00 | 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 share an interest in causal identification broadly speaking. Now in its tenth year, the WCE is a venue for methodological instruction and debate over design-based and observational methods for causal inference, both theory and applications.
The speakers are Judea Pearl, Rosa Matzkin, Niall Cardin, Angus Deaton, Chris Auld, Jeff Wooldridge, Ed Leamer, Karim Chalak, Rodrigo Pinto, Clark Glymour, Elias Barenboim, Adam Glynn, and Karthika Mohan.
Registration is free, but you must register at wce2017ucla.eventbrite.com to get a ticket for each day you plan to attend. Registration is first-come-first-served. The deadline to register is April 18, 2017 at 8:00 AM PDT.
We also will host free in-depth methods training workshops on the afternoon of Sunday, April 23. We are currently planning these workshops so please watch this space for upcoming details. The topics will include causal graphs and big data. You can register for these workshops when you register for the conference.
This conference is funded by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and sponsored by the UCLA Department of Political Science, UCR School of Public Policy, California Center for Population Research and the Center for Social Statistics.
The organizing committee this year is Chad Hazlett, Judea Pearl, Rodrigo Pinto, and Manisha Shah.

The Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar (PPASS), Amy Finkelstein
2017-04-20 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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 economic development. Featured research typically employ strong empirical analyses to address issues of deep policy relevance that are of interest to applied social science faculty and students on campus.
Amy Finkelstein
The Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar (PPASS)
April 20, 2017, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
4240 Public Affairs Building

NBER Cohort Studies Meeting 2017
2017-04-15 08:00 - 2017-04-16 17:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, 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 NBER.
April 15-16, 2017 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
4240 Public Affairs Building

Siwan Anderson, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
2017-04-12 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Legal Origins and Female HIV “
More than half of all people living with HIV are women and 80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formally colonized countries significantly determines current day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law Sub-Saharan African countries compared to Civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In Sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safer sex and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the ‘feminization of AIDS’) explaining much of its prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
More on Prof. Anderson

Kayla de la Haye, University of Southern California
2017-04-05 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Harnessing Social Networks and Social Systems for Obesity Prevention
ABSTRACT
Our health and social networks are closely intertwined. In this talk, I describe how the complex web of family, friend, and peer relationships in which we are embedded—i.e., our social networks– influence eating, physical activity, and obesity, and how the dynamics of our evolving behaviors and social networks shape population obesity rates. I will outline intervention and policy strategies that have the potential to activate, harness, or alter social networks and broader social-ecological systems, so that these social contexts play a more supportive role in the prevention and treatment of obesity.
More on Prof. de la Haye
Podcast Here

Jeremy Freese, Stanford University
2017-03-22 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“The Problem of Causal Mutualisms, The Promise of Polygenic Scores, and The Pervasive Divergence of Life Outcomes”
Abstract:
Casual mutualisms are sets of properties that have substantial reciprocal influence on one another. This may sound abstruse, but various big constructs in behavioral science, including “heritability,” “SES”, “health”, and “achievement,” exhibit clear signs of instantiating massive mutualisms and yet many implications of their doing so remain largely unpursued. The talk will describe the problem and several routes into it by reference to a series of phenomena that might otherwise appear unrelated, on intellectual achievement, educational attainment, and health disparities. Together these examples are used to argue for a more strongly integrative and developmental social science, as well as the potential value of predictive scores based on genomic information for helping reckon with mutualisms.

More on Prof. Freese

Julia Lane, New York University
2017-03-15 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“Research Funding and the Foreign Born”
There has been a resurgence of interest in the link between immigration and economic activity. The evidence suggests that US education plays an important role in both attracting and retaining high-quality foreign-born students. This is particularly true in the case of doctorates trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), a workforce that is disproportionately foreign born and likely to contribute to long-term economic growth. Because of this, much effort is given toward attracting talented students and retaining them in the US workforce after they complete their studies. However, little is known about how that attraction and retention works. In this paper we use new data to examine the role of an important policy lever-research funding—in keeping both domestic and foreign-born workers in the US labor market.

More on Prof. Julia Lane

Shripad Tuljapurkar, Stanford University
2017-03-08 12:00 - 13:30 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“New Thoughts on Old Age”
Abstract: I will discuss late-age career transitions and retirement incentive plans, the annuity puzzle, and financial issues that are faced by the aging population. My discussion aims to stimulate new thoughts and argument about aging and retirement.

More on Prof. Tuljapurkar
