California Center for Population Research

Clémence Tricaud, University of California, Los Angeles, "Gender and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Crisis Response"
2023-11-29 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
Bio:
Clémence Tricaud is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is also a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and an affiliate member of the CESifo. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique and CREST in 2020. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy and public economics. Her work combines quasi-experimental designs with administrative data to better understand the determinants and consequences of citizen and policymaker behaviors. The first part of her research studies the factors affecting voters’ and candidates’ behavior during elections and the consequences of their choices on electoral outcomes. The second part of her work explores how the identity of policymakers and the level of governance affect the design of local public policies and the provision of public goods.
“Gender and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Crisis Response”
Abstract:
This paper provides new evidence on why men and women leaders make different choices. We first illustrate, using a simple political agency model, how voters’ gender bias can lead reelection-seeking female politicians to undertake different policies. We then test the predictions of the model by exploring female and male leaders’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Assuming that voters expect policies to be less effective if decided by women, the model predicts that female politicians undertake less containment effort when voters perceive the threat as low – such as at the beginning of the pandemic – while the opposite is true when voters perceive it as serious – once the health consequences have become apparent. Using a close election design in Brazil, we find that, in line with the model, having a female mayor led to more deaths per capita at first, but to a lower death rate later in the year. Moreover, using new data on policies, we show that female mayors were less likely to close non-essential businesses early on, but then became more likely to do so. Consistent with electoral incentives and voters’ gender bias explaining these effects, we show that the gender differences we find are driven exclusively by mayors facing reelection and that the effects are stronger in more competitive races and in municipalities with greater gender discrimination. All in all, our paper shows that gender differences in leaders’ behavior can be explained by leaders’ incentives to adapt their policy choices to voters’ gender biases.
A recording of this event can be found here.
To learn more about Professor Clémence Tricaud, visit her department homepage here:
Clémence Tricaud | UCLA Anderson School of Management

Bryce Steinberg, Brown University, "Family Planning, Now and Later: Infertility Fear and Contraception Take-Up"
2023-11-15 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Bryce Millett Steinberg is a development economist who studies how households make decisions about investing in education and health, and how market forces and government programs can affect those decisions. Her work is primarily focused in India and Zambia. She is currently the IJC Assistant Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2015.
Family Planning, Now and Later: Infertility Fear and Contraception Take-Up
Abstract:
Early fertility is believed to be one of the key barriers to female human capital attainment in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet contraception take-up remains low, even among highly-educated populations with healthcare access. We study a barrier to contraceptive uptake that has not yet been examined in the literature: the persistent belief that it may cause later infertility, thus creating a perceived tradeoff between current and future reproductive control. We use a randomized controlled trial with female undergraduates at the flagship university in Zambia – a highly-skilled population where education is likely to have particularly high returns – to test two potential interventions to increase contraception use, one focused on time costs and one on costs to future fertility. Despite high rates of sexual activity and low rates of condom-use, only 5% of this population uses hormonal contraception at baseline. Providing a non-coercive conditional cash transfer to visit a local clinic temporarily increases contraceptive use. But, pairing this transfer with information addressing fears that contraceptives cause infertility permanently increases take-up over 6 months. The latter treatment moves beliefs about the infertility effects of contraceptives and leads to the take-up of longer-lasting contraceptives like injections. Compliers are more likely to cite fear of infertility as the reason for not using contraceptives at baseline. A follow-up experiment provides suggestive evidence that students are more likely to test for STIs when they are told STIs cause infertility. These findings indicate that perceived risks to future fertility are one cost of contraception, and more generally that future fertility has economic value to women.
To learn more about Professor Bryce Steinberg, visit her department homepage:
Bryce Millett Steinberg | Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (brown.edu)

Cesi Cruz, University of California, Los Angeles, "Reducing Vaccine Hesitancy in Polarized Societies"
2023-11-08 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Cesi Cruz is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works on topics at the intersection of political science and economics, including elections, misinformation, gender and inclusive development. Her research is based on fieldwork in Cambodia and the Philippines and combines social network analysis, surveys, and field experiments. Her work has been published in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, Economic Journal, and Comparative Political Studies.
Cesi is a board member of Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP), the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE), and Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC). In addition, she serves on the executive board of Women Also Know Stuff, an organization to promote women’s scholarship in political science. Her projects and working papers are available on her website: www.cesicruz.com .
Reducing Vaccine Hesitancy In Polarized Societies
Abstract:
Governments attempting to encourage their citizens to take socially beneficial but individ- ually costly actions face strong challenges, especially in polarized societies. We designed interventions to make citizens reflect on the personal and social benefits of vaccination and implemented a survey experiment on a sample of 1,900 Filipinos in May 2021, around the start of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the Philippines. Using data collected a year later, we find that treated individuals received their first dose earlier. Those effects are large: treated individuals were 5.3 percentage-points more likely to receive their first dose within a month of the first survey, compared with a control group mean of 2.1 percent. Individuals who were positive about vaccination at baseline respond more strongly to the treatments, suggesting that the interventions motivated and encouraged individuals to become vaccinated, rather than persuading people who were against vaccination to become vaccinated. In fact, these strong positive short term effects mask important negative effects among the sample of individuals who were not planning to be vaccinated at baseline: the treatments had small negative effects on the likelihood of being vaccinated at endline.

Computing Orientation Workshop with Neal Fultz (STC workshop)
2023-11-01 12:00 - 13:15
Computing Orientation Workshop with Neal Fultz

Instructor: Neal Fultz
This workshop has two halves. In the first half, we will dive into the 3 main computing resources that CCPR offers to affiliates, including it’s remote and on campus offerings. At the end of the first half, we’ll get participants signed up for hoffman2 and TS2. Once signed up, you’ll have state of the art hardware resources and most software you’ll ever need for demographic research. In the second half, we’ll walk through how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

Julia Strasser, George Washington University, "Who is Providing Contraception & Abortion Care in the US? Using Claims Data to Study the Reproductive Health Workforce"
2023-10-25 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Julia Strasser, DrPH, MPH, is the Director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health and an Assistant Research Professor of Health Policy and Management at the George Washington University. Dr. Strasser’s research focuses on contraception, abortion, and access to care for underserved populations. She has worked in healthcare, focusing on policy and research, for over 15 years, including previous positions at the National Cancer Institute, the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, and Planned Parenthood of Western Washington. She holds a DrPH in Health Policy from The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, an MPH from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a concentration in women’s and reproductive health, and a BA in History from Yale University.
Who is Providing Contraception & Abortion Care in the US? Using Claims Data to Study the Reproductive Health Workforce
Abstract:
The clinical workforce providing contraception and abortion care in the US is a critical determinant of access to care. However, a series of data limitations has made it difficult to study this workforce at the national level. Using national-level medical and prescription claims datasets, we have constructed a first-of-its-kind database and analyzed various aspects of this workforce, including its composition by specialty, distribution by state and county, and shifts over time. This presentation will discuss: 1. Differences in provision of contraceptive services by physician specialty and advanced practice clinician type 2. Changes to the contraception and abortion care workforce during Covid-19, and 3. Association between residency training for family medicine physicians and provision of reproductive health services to Medicaid beneficiaries.
A recording of this event can be found here.

Pauline Rossi, Ecole Polytechnique-CREST, "Drivers of Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso (joint with Pascaline Dupas, Seema Jayachandran and Adriana Lleras-Muney)"
2023-10-18 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Pauline Rossi is an Associate Professor of Economics at Ecole Polytechnique-CREST and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. Her fields of research are Applied Microeconomics, Development Economics and Family Economics. She is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant “Peers and Possible Partners: Exploring the Origins of Population Long-term Equilibria” (P3OPLE). She is visiting CCPR in October-November 2023.
Drivers of Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso (joint with Pascaline Dupas, Seema Jayachandran and Adriana Lleras-Muney)
Abstract:
We conducted a study among 14,545 households in rural Burkina Faso to test some of the leading explanations for persistently high fertility rates in West Africa. First, we reject the oft-cited explanation of limited access to contraception. Women in communities randomly assigned to have free access to medical contraception for three years did not have lower birth rates. Second, we cross-randomized additional interventions to test whether high desired fertility stems from incorrect or sticky beliefs and norms, specifically mis-perceptions about the child mortality rate, limited exposure to opposing views, and social pressure. None of these interventions, or combinations of them, had any detectable effect on realized fertility, desired fertility, or contraceptive use. Our results are consistent with couples personally benefiting from having a large family size and suggest that policies aimed at reducing fertility through family planning interventions may have only limited impact in such contexts.

Gary Solon, University of Michigan, "What Are We Weighting For?" (STC Workshop)
2023-10-11 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Gary Solon is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Michigan. He was Eller Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona during 2015-2018 and Professor of Economics at Michigan State University during 2007-2015. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, and a member of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. His research includes studies of family and community background effects on socioeconomic status, earnings dynamics over the life cycle, cyclical fluctuations in the labor market, and microeconometric methods.
What Are We Weighting For?
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to help empirical economists think through when and how to weight the data used in estimation. We start by distinguishing two purposes of estimation: to estimate population descriptive statistics and to estimate causal effects. In the former type of research, weighting is called for when it is needed to make the analysis sample representative of the target population. In the latter type, the weighting issue is more nuanced. We discuss three distinct potential motives for weighting when estimating causal effects: (1) to achieve precise estimates by correcting for heteroskedasticity, (2) to achieve consistent estimates by correcting for endogenous sampling, and (3) to identify average partial effects in the presence of unmodeled heterogeneity of effects. In each case, we find that the motive sometimes does not apply in situations where practitioners often assume it does. We recommend diagnostics for assessing the advisability of weighting, and we suggest methods for appropriate inference.

Seminar Series: Welcome and Introduction
2023-10-04 12:00 - 13:00 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
California Center for Population Research Seminar Series
Welcome and Introductions
Wednesday, October 4, 2023 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm 4240A Public Affairs Building
(Lunch will be provided)
This will be the kick-off event for the start of the upcoming 2023-24 CCPR Seminar Series. Please join us to learn all about CCPR as we welcome new affiliates and reconnect in person.

UCSD/UCLA/CIFAR Conference on Development Economics, Political Economy, and Culture
2023-09-30 09:00 - 16:30 | UCSD, PEB 721, University of California, San Diego Dean's Office, School of Social Sciences 9500 Gilman Drive, # 0502, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0502, United States
The development groups at UCSD and UCLA are organizing a one-day workshop for advanced graduate students (e.g., those going on the market soon) and junior faculty in the Southern California area to present work related to Economic Development, Preference Formation, Political Economy, and Culture.
The workshop will be held at UCSD on Saturday September 30, 2023 and a preliminary schedule can be found here.
If you are interested in attending, please RSVP here

UC Carpentries Fall Workshop Series: Coding and Data Management (Free Multiple Virtual Events)
2023-09-11 08:30 - 2023-09-21 12:30 | https://ti.to/ucsd-carpentries/uc-carpentries-fall-workshop-2023
Attend as many or as few sessions as you wish
This free, virtual workshop is designed for researchers and enables non-experts to develop computing skills for research analysis. Registration is open to all UC students, staff, postdocs, and faculty.
Time: 8:30 – 12:30 PDT via Zoom
Week 1
Sept. 11 / Day 1: The Unix Shell
Sept. 12 / Day 2: Git Version Control
Sept. 13 / Day 3: R (part 1)
Sept. 14 / Day 4: R (part 2)
Week 2
Sept. 18/Day 5: Python (part 1)
Sept. 19/Day 6: Python (part 2)
Sept. 20/Day 7: Tidy Data
Sept. 21/Day 8: SQL
To register for this event visit: https://ti.to/ucsd-carpentries/uc-carpentries-fall-workshop-2023
Workshop Details
What is this workshop?
An 8-Day Carpentries workshop that aims to teach participants basic concepts, skills, and tools for R in RStudio, Python in Jupyter Notebook, an introduction to the Unix Shell, Version Control with Git, SQL, and Tidy Data. This workshop is designed for researchers and enables non-experts to develop computing skills for research analysis. This is a free workshop.
Who can participate?
The workshop is open to all University of California students, staff, postdocs and faculty.
Curriculum:

Introduction to Unix Shell: learn the basics of command line interface and about navigating and working within files and directories
Version Control with Git: learn how to manage work, edit code, and collaborate on a team project in a repository
Introduction to R: learn basic coding, concepts, how to access data, and use functions for data analysis using a RStudio
Introduction to Python: learn basic coding, concepts, how to access data, and use functions for data analysis using a web-based application – Jupyter Notebook.
Tidy Data: learn how to use this tool to clean, transform, and track changes made to data.
SQL: learn about relational databases, how to import data, and how to run basic SQL queries.

This workshop is co-hosted and supported by efforts from UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles, UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley.
Questions?
Contact Elizabeth McAulay, UCLA Library, at emcaulay@library.ucla.edu.

UC Carpentries Fall Workshop Series: Coding and Data Management (virtual)
2023-08-23 08:00 - 17:00

More events to come beginning Fall 2023
2023-07-01 08:00 - 17:00
More events to come beginning Fall 2023.

SICSS Conference 2023
2023-06-20 08:00 - 2023-06-30 17:00
From June 20 to June 30, 2023, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Division of Social Sciences and the California Center for Population Research will sponsor the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, to be held at the University of California Los Angeles.

For more information about the event go here: https://sicss.io/2023/ucla/

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
2023-06-19 08:00 - 2023-06-30 17:00
From June 19 to June 30, 2023, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Division of Social Sciences and the California Center for Population Research will sponsor the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, to be held at the University of California Los Angeles. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together advanced Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived).
The instructional program will involve lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects, with a special emphasis on causal inference. There will also be outside speakers who conduct computational social science research in a variety of settings, such as academia, industry, and government. Topics covered include causal inference with observational data, text analysis, network analysis, survey experiments, and machine learning. There will be ample opportunities for participants to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers. Because we are committed to open and reproducible research, all materials created by faculty and participants for the Summer Institute will be released open source.
Participation is restricted to advanced Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty (within 7 years of their Ph.D). We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and fields of study, especially junior faculty from neighboring institutions near Los Angeles. About 25-30 participants will be invited, and participants are expected to fully attend and participate in the entire two-week program.
Application materials are due April 7, 2023.

Robert Mare Student Lecture
2023-05-31 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Caitlin is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at UCLA. She is broadly interested in inequality in educational and occupational attainment, the role of education in social stratification processes, and policy approaches to addressing poverty and inequality. She is also interested in applications of causal inference using large-scale survey data. Her dissertation explores the ways that initial college enrollment decisions shape the transition to adulthood, with a focus on the least selective four-year college options. Caitlin is a student affiliate at the California Center for Population Research and a research fellow for the Los Angeles Education Research Institute. In the fall, she will start a postdoctoral fellowship with Stanford Impact Labs, where she will be studying the effects of guaranteed income and baby bonds with the Economic Inclusion Project.
The Power of a Degree: Examining the Direct and Indirect Effects of Broad-Access College Enrollment on Economic Disadvantage
Abstract: As the availability of high-quality jobs for less-educated workers has diminished, college is seen as the surest way to avoid adverse socioeconomic outcomes. Yet, the benefits to college depend not only on whether an individual enrolls in school but also where. This study uses longitudinal data sources to examine the impact of enrollment in minimally or non-selective four-year colleges on bachelor’s degree completion and economic disadvantage. My findings show positive effects of broad-access four-year college enrollment on bachelor’s degree completion relative to community college enrollment, but negative effects relative to more-selective college. However, these differences in degree completion contribute to only modest changes in economic disadvantage in early adulthood. Instead, not enrolling in any college is associated with greater economic disadvantage than enrolling in a broad-access four-year college. These findings collectively underscore the importance of any college enrollment in preventing economic disadvantage and the pivotal role of bachelor’s degree completion in reaping the economic benefits of attending college. However, they also highlight the need to address structural inequalities in college access to reduce disparities in educational attainment and emphasize the importance of considering the counterfactual group when evaluating the returns to college selectivity.
Biography: Pablo Geraldo Bastías is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UCLA. His research examines how institutions influence inequality in education and the labor market, with a particular focus in the comparative study of skill formation systems and school-to-work transitions. Methodologically, he is interested in the intersection of causal inference using graphical models, machine learning, and network analysis. After graduating from UCLA, he will be a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowship in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Secondary effects of tuition-free college on high school trajectories: Evidence from Chile
Abstract: The discussion about the costs of college education, who has to pay for it, and its implication for social inequality and mobility, is of primary importance for educational stratification scholars and policy makers. While increasing evidence has accumulated on the impact of access to secure funding in reducing enrollment and completion gaps in higher education, there is less evidence on how large-scale policy changes on college funding would affect students’ decision earlier in their educational trajectories, in anticipation of benefiting from such policies in the future. In this study I show how the introduction of tuition-free college in Chile (2016) affected the educational trajectories of high school students. Using administrative data analyzed in an event-study framework, I provide evidence of the positive effect that increasing access to guaranteed funding for higher education had on secondary students, lowering grade retention and dropout rates, especially among the most socially disadvantaged students.

Difference-In-Difference Panel Discussion and Mini Conference
2023-05-24 12:00 - 13:30 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Differences-in-differences Mini-conference
May 24, 2023
UCLA, California Center for Population Research
9-11:30am Speakers hold for meetings
12-1:30pm [CCPR seminar slot] Panel discussion: What’s new with differences-in-differences?
Andrew Goodman-Bacon (Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank), Alyssa Bilinski (Brown), Jon Roth (Brown), Pedro Sant’Anna (Vanderbilt), Jeff Wooldridge (MSU)
SHORT LUNCH BREAK & ROOM SET UP
2:15-3:00pm Andrew Goodman-Bacon (Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank), Pedro Sant’Anna (Vanderbilt)
“Difference-in-Differences with a Continuous Treatments”
This paper analyzes difference-in-differences setups with a continuous treatment. We show that treatment effect on the treated-type parameters can be identified under a generalized parallel trends assumption that is similar to the binary treatment setup. However, interpreting differences in these parameters across different values of the treatment can be particularly challenging due to treatment effect heterogeneity. We discuss alternative, typically stronger, assumptions that alleviate these challenges. We also provide a variety of treatment effect decomposition results, highlighting that parameters associated with popular two-way fixed-effect specifications can be hard to interpret, even when there are only two time periods. We introduce alternative estimation strategies that do not suffer from these drawbacks. Our results also cover cases where (i) there is no available untreated comparison group and (ii) there are multiple periods and variation in treatment timing, which are both common in empirical work.
3:00-3:45pm Alyssa Bilinski (Brown)
“Parallel Trends in an Unparalleled Pandemic: Difference-in-Differences for Infectious Disease Policy Evaluation”
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have extensively studied the impact of public health interventions, such as stay-at-home orders and mask policies, on disease incidence and mortality. Many policy evaluations employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, which assumes that treatment and non-experimental comparison groups would have moved in parallel in expectation, absent the intervention (the “parallel trends assumption”). While researchers have used different specifications to capture potential non-linearities, the plausibility of these specifications in the context of dynamic infection transmission is less well-understood. Our work bridges this gap by formalizing epidemiological assumptions required for different DiD specifications, positing an underlying susceptible, infectious, recovered (SIR) model. We first explore common DiD specifications, demonstrating that these often imply strict epidemiological assumptions. For example, DiD modeling raw cases or deaths as an outcome will be biased unless treatment and comparison groups have the same initial conditions, susceptible fraction, and transmission rate (“force of infection”); using a log transformation allows for different initial conditions, but requires equal transmission rates and and susceptible fractions among groups. Furthermore, even if estimates are unbiased, both specifications are often highly anti-conservative under standard error assumptions of a stochastic agent-based SIR model. We then present more robust alternatives, including modeling log difference as the primary outcome and modeling the causal effect of an intervention on the effective reproduction number, rather than cases or deaths. We demonstrate the implications of this work reanalyzing prior work on school mask policies.
3:45pm Coffee break
4-4:45pm Jeff Woodridge (MSU)
“Estimating Distributional Treatment Effects with Staggered Interventions for Panel Data”
I propose simple, parametric approaches for estimating distributions of potential outcomes in a staggered difference-in-differences setting. The approach relies on versions of no anticipation and parallel trends assumptions. Estimators include imputation estimators or pooled maximum likelihood estimation. The approach can be applied to discrete, continuous, and mixed outcomes. A leading application is estimating quantile treatment effects in staggered DiD settings for a continuous outcome.
4:45-5:30pm Jonathan Roth (Brown)
“Log-like? Identified ATEs Defined with Zero-valued Outcomes are (Arbitrarily) Scale-Dependent”
Economists frequently estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) for transformations of the outcome that are well-defined at zero but behave like logpyq when y is large (e.g., logp1 ` yq, arcsinhpyq). We show that these ATEs depend arbitrarily on the units of the outcome, and thus should not be interpreted as percentage effects. In line with this result, we find that estimated treatment effects for arcsinh-transformed outcomes published in the American Economic Review change substantially when we multiply the units of the outcome by 100 (e.g., convert dollars to cents). To help delineate alternative approaches, we prove that when the outcome can equal zero, there is no average treatment effect of the form EP rgpY p1q, Y p0qqs that is point-identified and unit-invariant. We conclude by discussing sensible alternative target parameters for settings with zero-valued outcomes that relax at least one of these requirements.

"How to do Differences-in-Differences" Workshop
2023-05-23 14:00 - 17:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
CCPR will host an in-person workshop, “How to do Difference-in-Differences,” with Pedro Sant’Anna. Difference-in-Differences (DiD) is among the most popular strategies to identify causal effects in observational studies. The workshop will update you on this fast-moving literature and best practices with hands-on practice in R and Stata.

For Ph.D. students, post-docs, faculty (or anyone who would like to attend, space permitting).
Topics include:

A deep-dive into canonical DiD methods
Understanding limitations of linear two-way fixed effects regressions
Allowing for heterogeneous treatment effects when treatment timing varies
Allowing for covariate-specific trends

A recording of Dr. Sant’Anna’s presentation may be accessed here.

Steven Stillman, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
2023-05-17 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Steven Stillman received his PhD in Economics from the University of Washington in 2000. Prior to moving to Italy in 2016, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His research focuses on empirical labour economics, specialising in the behaviour of individuals and households, and the interplay between government policy and human behavior. He has done extensive work examining the impact of migration on immigrants and their families exploiting a lottery used to allocate migrant quota slots. In recent work, he has also examined voting behavior along a number of dimensions and how individuals have responded to changes in a number of policies, including minimum wages, the drinking age and doctor’s fees.
Learning About Leave: Peer Influences in Maternal Leave Decisions
Abstract: We examine how the parental leave decisions of mothers are influenced by parental leave decisions made by their work colleagues (peers) using income tax data on the universe of women who gave birth in New Zealand between 2002 and 2018. Maternal leave in New Zealand replaces 100% of mothers’ income up to a fairly low maximum. We use this maximum threshold to implement a regression kink design, estimating the causal impact of peer leave decisions on mothers’ own leave decisions. We find that for every week that peers shorten their maternity leave in response to this threshold, mothers reduce their own leave by 0.5 to 0.6 weeks. This effect is larger in smaller firms and in situations where the peer is more likely to influence the decision of the study mother.
A recording of Dr. Stillman’s presentation may be accessed here.

Itzik Fadlon, University of California San Diego
2023-05-10 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Itzik Fadlon is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego and a Research Associate in the programs on Aging and Public Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His primary fields of interest are public finance, health economics, and labor/family economics. His work studies household behavior and the effects of government policies, as well as how these impacts on households’ behavior translate to the optimal design of social policies. His work has been published in leading journals such as American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Itzik received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in May 2015. Before joining UCSD in 2016 as an Assistant Professor, Itzik spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Policy Research at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he spent the academic year of 2019-2020 as a Visiting Scholar in Aging and Health Research at the NBER.
Title: “Causal Effects of Early Career Sorting on Labor and Marriage Market Choices: A Foundation for Gender Disparities and Norms”
Abstract: We study whether and how early labor market choices determine longer-run career versus family outcomes differentially for male and female professionals. We analyze the physician labor market by exploiting a randomized lottery that determines the sorting of Danish physicians into internships across local labor markets. Using administrative data spanning ten years after physicians’ graduations, we find causal effects of early-career sorting on a range of life cycle outcomes that cascade from labor market choices, including human capital accumulation and occupational choice, to marriage market choices, including matching and fertility. The persistent effects are entirely concentrated among women, whereas men experience only temporary career disruptions. The evidence points to differential family-career tradeoffs and the mentorship employers provide as channels underlying this gender divergence. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at gender equality in outcomes, as they reveal how persistent gaps can arise even in institutionally gender-neutral settings with early-stage equality of opportunity.

All-UC Demography Conference 2023
2023-05-04 11:00 - 2023-05-05 17:00
All-UC Demography Conference 2023 – Save the date

UCI’s Center for Population, Inequality and Policy will invite submissions to present at the inaugural All-UC Demography Conference. This meeting will highlight current demographic research happening within the UC system and provide a venue for making connections across UC campuses, with a keynote talk by Ron Lee, Distinguished Professor and founding director of UC Berkeley Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging.

The conference will be held Thursday, May 4, and Friday, May 5 in person at University of California, Irvine. It will begin at 9am on the 4th and end at noon, May 5th. We are planning for the keynote talk and faculty paper sessions with discussants. We will also host a graduate poster session and a reception at the end of the Thursday sessions. Lunch will be served on both days, with boxed lunch available at the conclusion of the Friday morning session. More details are forthcoming.

To receive meeting updates and our call for papers, please register for our mailing list.

Conference website: https://www.cpip.uci.edu/conference.php

Organizing Committee: Brittney Morey, Jade Jenkins, Paul Hanselman, Greg Duncan, Timothy Bruckner

The Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy (CPIP) was founded at UCI in 2020 to centralize the efforts of several population-related centers at UCI that were internally funded and operating independently. CPIP is now the sole recipient of university-level resources to support a center for the study of population sciences at UCI. To learn more, please visit us at https://www.cpip.uci.edu/.

Zack Almquist, University of Washington
2023-05-03 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Zack W. Almquist is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Adjunct Associate Professor of Statistics, and Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. Before coming to UW in 2020, Prof. Almquist held positions as a Research Scientist at Facebook, Inc and as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Almquist is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology’s Leo Goodman Award. He is also a recipient of the NSF’s CAREER Award and the ARO’s Young Investigator Program Award. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology. His research centers on the development and application of mathematical, computational and statistical methodology to problems and theory of social networks, demography, homelessness, and environmental action and governance.
A Qualitative and Quantitative PIT Count using Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS): Understanding and Counting Unsheltered Homelessness in King County
Abstract: Traditionally, unsheltered Point in Time (PIT) Counts are the result of volunteers conducting an in-person head-count of individuals experiencing homelessness on a single night. This resource-intensive method is widely understood to be an undercount. It also fails to capture essential qualitative data about what people living unsheltered experience and need.
This past spring, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (RHA), in coordination with Professor Zack W. Almquist (University of Washington) and Lived Experience Coalition (LEC), took a novel approach to the PIT. The RHA conducted the 2022 unsheltered PIT count as a combined qualitative interview process and quantitative survey over the course of a month. The respondent selection for both the qualitative and quantitative surveys followed a Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) protocol. RDS provides a sampling strategy for estimating size and percentages of hard-to-reach populations that lack an administrative sampling frame.
During this seminar, I will provide an overview of the RHA partnership effort, and how we executed this novel approach to the PIT. I will review the history of RDS as a means of sampling vulnerable populations, and I will cover the implementation of the sampling and estimation strategies based on the RHA RDS sample. Finally, I will review the demographics provided to HUD, and what we learned from conducting the RDS sample for the PIT count, and how it can and should affect future PIT counts going forwards.
You may access the seminar using this link.

Marcella Alsan, Harvard University
2023-04-26 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Marcella Alsan is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Alsan received a BA from Harvard University, a master’s in public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a MD from Loyola University, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Alsan trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship – then combined the PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior to returning to Harvard she was on faculty at Stanford. She is an applied microeconomist studying health inequality.
“Something Works: Misconduct and Recidivism Effects of the IGNITE Program”
Abstract: US incarceration policy is often influenced by the longstanding view that “nothing works” when it comes to rehabilitating inmates. We revisit this question with a novel quasi-experimental approach and estimate the misconduct and recidivism effects of IGNITE: an innovative inmate education program in Flint, Michigan. Individuals whose court hearings are idiosyncratically rescheduled tend to spend more time in the county jail and have worsened outcomes prior to the launch of IGNITE. Afterwards, individuals who are more exposed to IGNITE via rescheduling see dramatically reduced rates of violent and suicidal incidents in the jail and lowered recidivism post-release.

Workshop: Preproducibility: what we may not, with advantage, omit
2023-04-19 12:00 - 13:30 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Workshop: Preproducibility: what we may not, with advantage, omit
Please note that there will be no remote attendance for this event. All attendees must attend the workshop in person.
Panelists: Philip B. Stark (Remote), Yotam Shem-Tov, Irene Bloemraad (Remote), and Randall Kuhn
Moderator: Patrick Heuveline
Presenter:
Philip B. Stark is Distinguished Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds an AB in Philosophy from Princeton University and a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include philosophy of science and foundations of probability and statistics, active transportation, cosmology, elections, earthquakes, gender bias, lottery fraud, nonparametric statistics, physics, regenerative agriculture, simulation, uncertainty quantification, and wild food in urban ecosystems. Methods he invented for auditing elections are in law in about ten states. He has served as an expert witness or consultant for many Fortune 500 companies; the U.S. departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Veterans Affairs; and numerous state agencies. He currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Workshop: Preproducibility: what we may not, with advantage, omit
Workshop Description: Karl Popper (1992) wrote: “Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.” Communicating a scientific result requires enumerating, recording and reporting those things that cannot with advantage be omitted. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, chemist Robert Boyle (1660) wrote The New Experiments so “that the person I addressed them to might, without mistake, and with as little trouble as possible, be able to repeat such unusual experiments.” An experiment or analysis is preproducibleif it has been described in adequate detail for others to repeat it. Most current published science is not preproducible. We need to fix that.
Moderator:
Patrick Heuveline is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He is also the Associate Director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research.
Panelists:
Yotam Shem-Tov is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA. His research primarily focuses on Labor and Public Economics with a special interest in the U.S. criminal justice system. He received a BA in Economics and Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley.
Irene Bloemraad (Remote) (Ph.D. Harvard; M.A. McGill) is the Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology. She also serves as the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley, is the founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, and co-directs the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.In 2014-15, she was a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences committee reporting on the integration of immigrants into American society.
Randall Kuhn is a demographer and sociologist focused on the social determinants of health among vulnerable populations. He is an expert in survey design, longitudinal analysis and counterfactual research design. In the field of migration and health, Kuhn has designed new approaches to estimating the impact of migration on health. In global health, Kuhn leads a 35-year longitudinal study of the impact of health and development programs in Bangladesh. In the area of homelessness, Kuhn conducted some of the earliest quantitative research on health and substance use risks among chronically homeless adults. He co-authored recent reports on homelessness and the coronavirus outbreak for the National Alliance to End Homelessness and on health and homelessness in Los Angeles.

2023 PAA Conference
2023-04-12 08:00 - 2023-04-15 17:00
CCPR at PAA 2023 Conference schedule may be accessed here.

PAA Student Practice Talks
2023-04-05 12:00 - 13:00 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Who Is Having the Second Baby? Educational Assortative Mating and Transition to the Second Child in China

Iris Zhao, Acton Jiashi Feng (equal authorship)
Abstract: China continues to experience low fertility despite the lifting of the one-child policy. Most explanations focus on limited resources and ignore the role of educational assortative mating and couple dynamics. We use five waves of Chinese Family Panel Study (CFPS) data to address the link between educational pairing and second childbirths. We hypothesize that (1) hypergamous couples are more likely to have a second child than hypogamous and homogamous couples, (2) among homogamous couples, a U-shape for the likelihood of second childbirth exists along levels of education: highly educated and lower educated couples have higher likelihoods of transitioning to the second child than couples with medium education level.
Assimilating or Diverging? Generational Differences in Time Use of Asian American and Hispanic Immigrant Youth
Kristin Liao, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
Abstract: Sociologists studying international migration have rarely examined how immigrants allocate their time to daily activities. Yet, immigrants’ time use can be seen as a measure of assimilation. Using data from the 2003-2019 American Time Use Survey, this study explores how foreign-born, second-generation, and third-plus-generation Asian American and Hispanic youth differ in the patterns of daily time use relative to their third-plus generation White peers. I find patterns of generational convergence and ethnoracial divergence. Foreign-born and second-generation immigrant youth invest substantially more time in education than third-plus-generation White youth, while no significant differences were found among third-plus-generation immigrant youth. Asian American youth show steep changes across immigrant generations in their time use pattern which increasingly resembles that of third-plus generation Whites, whereas time use among Hispanic youth neither varies much across immigrant generations nor increasingly resembles the pattern of native Whites.

Yotam Shem-Tov, UCLA
2023-03-15 12:00 - 13:30
Biography: Yotam Shem-Tov is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA. His research primarily focuses on Labor and Public Economics with a special interest in the U.S. criminal justice system. He received a BA in Economics and Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley.
How Replaceable is a Low-Wage Job?
Abstract: This paper studies the long-run consequences of losing a low-wage job using linked employer-employee wage records and household surveys. For full-time workers earning $15 per hour or less, job loss due to an idiosyncratic, firm-wide contraction generates a 13% reduction in earnings 4-6 years later and more than $40,000 cumulative lost earnings. Most of this long-run decrease stems from reductions in employment and hours as opposed to wage rates: job losers are twice as likely to report being unemployed and looking for work, and annual weeks worked are reduced by 10%. By contrast, workers initially earning more than $15 per hour see comparable long-run earnings losses driven primarily by reductions in hourly wages. We interpret these effects through a dynamic job-ladder model, which implies that the flow rents from holding a full-time $15 per hour job relative to unemployment are 3.1% of earnings.
You may access the recording here.

Workshop: From preprints to tweets: The professional benefits and potential perils of online presence
2023-03-08 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
From preprints to tweets: the professional benefits and potential perils of online presence
Panelists: Elizabeth Rose Mayeda (Epi) and Julian Londoño-Vélez (Econ)
Moderator: Patrick Heuveline (Soc)
Elizabeth Rose Mayeda (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Mayeda’s research focuses on identifying modifiable determinants of cognitive decline, dementia, and stroke in late life. Her research program has both applied and methodological themes. She focuses on describing and identifying mechanisms contributing to disparities in late-life cognitive and brain health and also leads work addressing methodological challenges in longitudinal studies of stroke, cognitive aging, and dementia risk. Her long-term research goals are to: (1) identify effective population-level strategies to prevent dementia and eliminate disparities in dementia and (2) develop research tools to strengthen causal inference in dementia research and lifecourse epidemiology.
Juliana Londoño-Vélez is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her work primarily focuses on inequality and redistributive tax and transfer policies, with a special interest in developing countries.
Patrick Heuveline is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He is also the Associate Director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research.
Workshop Description: Our panelists will discuss how to advertise yourself and your work online. Should you have your own website and, if so, what should be included (or not)? Should you post unpublished work as preprints and, if so, at what stage of development? Should you be active on social media and, if so, how much is too much?

Sonalde Desai, University of Maryland (IN-PERSON EVENT ONLY)
2023-03-01 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Please note that this is an in-person event only. The talk will not be live streamed or recorded.
Biography: Sonalde Desai (Distinguished University Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director, NCAER-National Data Innovation Center, New Delhi) is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social transformation and its impact on the lives of individuals with a focus on education, employment, gender, and maternal and child health. She leads the India Human Development Survey of over 40,000 households, one of the few national panel surveys in India providing a rich and free public resource for studying the transformation of Indian society in the 21st Century. Since April 2020, Desai and her colleagues at NDIC have carried out telephone surveys around COVID-related experiences in Delhi National Capital Region. She received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and post-doctoral training at the University of Chicago and RAND Corporation. Desai was elected President of the Population Association of America for 2022. She is a frequent contributor to Indian newspapers and has published extensively in Indian and international journals.
The Global Aspirational Class and Its Demographic Fortunes
Abstract: Global educational expansion and growth in middle-income households in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) have brought worldwide attention to the social transformation underway in many countries. Yet, simultaneously, income inequalities within LMICs have also grown sharply, and employment opportunities have lagged behind the aspirational shifts. This seminar will examine the changes in education and employment opportunities in LMICs over the past three decades and explore changes in marriage, fertility, and investments in children that have accompanied these economic changes.

Chris Blattman, University of Chicago
2023-02-22 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute and Harris School of Public Policy. He is an economist and political scientist, and his work on violence, crime, and poverty has been widely covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Slate, Vox, and NPR. His most recent book is Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace.
Dr. Blattman was previously faculty at Columbia and Yale Universities, and holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School. He co-leads the Development Economics Center at the University of Chicago, the Peace & Recovery sector at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the Crime, Violence and Conflict initiative at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (JPAL).
Much of Dr. Blattman’s work designs and tests solutions to violence and poverty, and he has worked mainly in Colombia, Liberia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Chicago.
Predicting and Preventing Gun Violence: An Experimental Evaluation of READI Chicago
Abstract: Gun violence is the most pressing public safety problem in American cities. We report results from a randomized controlled trial (N = 2, 456) of a community-researcher partnership—the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI Chicago)—which provided 18 months of a supported job alongside cognitive behavioral therapy and other social supports. Algorithmic and human referral methods identified men with strikingly high scope for gun violence reduction: for every 100 people in the control group, there were over 11 shooting and homicide victimizations during the 20-month outcome period. Take-up and retention rates were comparable to programs for people facing far lower mortality risk. There is no statistically significant change in an index combining three measures of serious violence, the study’s primary outcome. But one component, shooting and homicide arrests, shows a suggestive decline of 64 percent (p = 0.15). Because shootings are so costly, READI generates social savings between $174,000 and $858,000 per participant, implying a benefit-cost ratio between 3.8 and 18.8 to 1. Moreover, participants referred by outreach workers—a pre-specified subgroup—show enormous declines in both arrests and victimizations for shootings and homicides that remain statistically significant even after multiple testing adjustments. These declines are concentrated among outreach referrals with high predicted risk, suggesting that human and algorithmic targeting may work better together.
The recording may be accessed here.

Juliana Londoño-Vélez, UCLA
2023-02-15 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Juliana Londoño-Vélez is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, a J-PAL Affiliate, and a Faculty Affiliate at CCPR and CEGA. Juliana works on inequality and redistributive tax and transfer policies, with a particular interest in developing countries.
Title: “Financial Aid and Social Mobility: Evidence from Colombia’s Ser Pilo Paga.”
Abstract: “We study the effects of financial aid on human capital and social mobility. In 2014, Colombia implemented a nationwide financial aid program covering the tuition of four-year undergraduate programs at 33 “high-quality” universities. We estimate effects on educational and labor market outcomes realized seven years after high school completion. We leverage the program’s discontinuous assignment rules based on test scores and household poverty using a regression discontinuity design and identify effects away from these discontinuities using difference-in-differences. First, financial aid has a long-lasting expansion of college access and quality, exposing students to colleges with high learning and earnings productivity. Moreover, it boosts social mobility by expanding college attainment, learning, and earnings and slashes the wealth gaps in attainment, learning, and earnings among equally-achieving students. Crucially, these sizable benefits are not offset by corresponding losses for nonrecipients. As a result, financial aid improves both equity and efficiency. Thanks to financial aid, colleges act as “engines of social mobility” rather than as “bastions of privilege.”

The recording may be accessed here.
