California Center for Population Research

Sameera Nayak, University of Maryland, Baltimore County: "Health in the Turbulent U.S. Sociopolitical Climate: Mental Health, Abortion Attitudes, & Immigration"
2024-01-31 12:00 - 13:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Dr. Sameera S. Nayak (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She uses social epidemiologic and qualitative methods to investigate associations between social conditions and health inequities around the world. She has conducted research globally in the East African region as well as domestically in the U.S. Her research streams intersect around three main themes: (1) immigrant health, immigration policy, and legal status stratification, (2) political determinants of health, such as partisan polarization and abortion access, and (3) equitable health system program development and evaluation. Her cross-cutting research bridges siloed work in public health, sociology, and political science. Some of her recent projects include identifying structural and legal barriers to help-seeking for immigrants who have experienced gender-based violence, assessing the adverse health impacts of perceived political polarization, mapping state-level alignment between abortion legislation and public attitudes, and examining how the spectrum of legal statuses at the micro-level impact the well-being of non-naturalized immigrants in the U.S. Dr. Nayak earned her Ph.D. in Population Health from Northeastern University in 2022. She holds an undergraduate degree from UCLA and a master’s degree from Columbia University.
Health in the Turbulent U.S. Sociopolitical Climate: Mental Health, Abortion Attitudes, & Immigration
Abstract:
The sociopolitical landscape of the United States (U.S.), including laws, policies, and societal values, creates conditions that differentially enhance or diminish population health. This talk will describe a program of research examining how polarization and hostility shape people’s lives, health, and behaviors across multiple levels of influence and domains of health in the U.S. How do perceptions of growing polarization in American society affect the onset of health conditions such as anxiety and depressive disorders? To what extent does polarized legislation at the state level align with public attitudes toward abortion access and legality? How are immigrant domestic violence survivors’ lives shaped by an increasingly hostile political climate? To answer these questions, I draw on three observational studies that leverage data from primary surveys, focus groups, the 2020 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and the Guttmacher Institute’s 2020 rating of state abortion policies. Results highlight the adverse mental health effects of deepening perceived political polarization, the disconnect between multifaceted public attitudes and polarized reproductive health legislation, and the detrimental individual-level impacts of dehumanizing immigration policy. Population health implications, structural interventions, and policy recommendations will be discussed.

Dowell Myers, University of Southern California, “Talking Demographics: Audience Reactions and Communication about Projections of Change”
2024-01-24 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Dowell Myers is a professor of policy, planning, and demography in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. His Ph.D. is from M.I.T. (urban planning). He has been an advisor to the Bureau of the Census and authored the widely referenced work on census analysis, Analysis with Local Census Data: Portraits of Change (Academic Press, 1992). His demographic work has included substantial emphasis on immigration, and his 2007 book Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America is widely recognized. Myers also served on the National Academy of Sciences study panel on the Economic and Fiscal Impacts of Immigration (2013-16). Research projects have focused on public narratives about immigration, aging, and taxation, projections of generational change, and the upward mobility of immigrants the longer they reside in the U.S. Most recently, he has concentrated on reasons for the mounting housing shortages that plague recent cohorts and raise the cost of living for all. This also includes public perceptions and reactions to demographic change as part of the problem analysis
“Talking Demographics: Immigration, Audience, and Narratives”
Abstract:
Demographic narratives express interpretations and conclusions drawn from quantitative analysis of demographic change. Whereas professional demographers focus on estimation of change and statistical explanation, the matter of public explanation and extraction of meaning is often left to others, traditionally journalists in the news media, but increasingly expanded to popular or political activists using social media. Reasons why professional demographers should take more responsibility and care for their public facing interpretations are demonstrated through two case examples. The first asks why it might appear from net changes that immigrants are “taking all the jobs” and “replacing” white Americans (while gross flows tell different stories). The second recounts difficulties the Census Bureau has encountered with their narratives in reports and press releases that accompany their population projections, which include racial changes and trends in future immigration. How might stronger awareness of audience and purpose lead to less misleading and more constructive demographic narratives?
A recording of this event can be found here.

Philip Massey, University of California, Los Angeles "Social Media as a Tool for Public Health Communication"
2024-01-17 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Dr. Philip M. Massey, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor in Community Health Sciences in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. His health communication scholarship focuses on media and technology in the U.S. and globally, on topics ranging from social media, vaccine communication, health literacy, entertainment education, and ethics in social media research. His work takes a mixed-methods approach focusing on health and media literacy in the context of multiple media environments. He has examined patterns and shifts in public opinion toward HPV vaccination on Twitter and Instagram, focusing on what types of messages are shared and how content is related to reach and impact. He has also developed and tested cancer prevention messages on social media to engage parents about the HPV vaccine, leveraging the power of narrative engagement and storytelling, and more recently extended this work to alcohol recovery. His global health work has examined the impact of media effects on health knowledge and attitudes, specifically related to storytelling and narrative engagement among a West African population, utilizing digital and social media.
“Social Media as a Tool for Public Health Communication”
Abstract:
The use of social media in public health has advanced the field dramatically over the last two decades. Traditional public health methods in surveillance and outbreak investigation, approaches in health education and promotion, and strategies in policy, advocacy and community organizing have all been applied, refined, and adapted for the social media environment. This talk will focus on social media as a tool for public health communication and will cover various examples from applied research on the HPV vaccine and global health. Ethical considerations will also be discussed as guidelines when using social media for public health research must also expand alongside these increasing capabilities and uses.

Emily Weisburst, University of California, Los Angeles, "Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety"
2024-01-10 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Emily Weisburst is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Weisburst’s work focuses on topics in labor economics, including criminal justice, education and immigration. Her research interests include understanding factors that impact police decision-making and public trust in police, as well as how interactions with the criminal justice system affect individuals, families and communities. Weisburst earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. While in graduate school, she worked as a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President and as a research associate for the RAND Corporation on joint projects with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Weisburst’s work has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the National Academy of Education, as well as by several UCLA organizations, including the UCLA Racial and Social Justice Grants Program, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Ziman Center for Real Estate, the California Center for Population Research, and the California Policy Lab.
“Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety”
Abstract:
How does immigration enforcement affect public safety? While heightened enforcement could decrease crime by incapacitating offenders, public safety could suffer if victims become less willing to report crimes. We examine the implementation of the federal Secure Communities program, which significantly increased the volume of detentions and deportations of unauthorized immigrants. Using survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Hispanic victims are less likely to report crimes to the police and Hispanic individuals are more likely to become victims of a crime after the program’s introduction. These two opposing effects lead to a null impact on reported crimes. We provide evidence that the decline in Hispanic reporting is a key channel driving their increased victimization. Our findings underscore the importance of directly measuring victim reporting for understanding the impact of criminal justice policies.
A recording of this event can be found here.
To learn more about Professor Emily Weisburst, visit her department homepage here:
Emily Weisburst | Luskin School of Public Affairs | Public Policy

Alex Bell, University of California, Los Angeles, "The Long-Term Impacts of Mentors: Evidence from Experimental and Administrative Data"
2023-12-06 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Alex Bell is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Policy Lab at UCLA. Dr. Bell’s research seeks to document the unequal experiences of workers in the labor market and the implications of these inequalities for society as a whole. He is also interested in the intersection of labor market inequality with innovation. He often collaborates with government and non-profit partners to leverage large-scale administrative datasets that allow him to combine academic research with policy impact. Prior to joining CPL, Dr. Bell earned a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. At CPL, Dr. Bell is part of a team focused on labor and employment. In this role, he leads economic analyses and authors academic papers and policy briefs.
The Long-Term Impacts of Mentors: Evidence from Experimental and Administrative Data
Abstract:
How do mentors shape kids’ identities and later-life outcomes? To evaluate this question, we leverage program administrative records and microdata from a 1991 RCT that randomized disadvantaged children’s eligibility for a popular mentoring program. Our re-analysis of the multitude of outcomes collected by the original short-run survey suggests that kids’ behaviors improved during the time they were with mentors. A linkage to later-life administrative tax records shows that treated youth were 10 percentage points more likely to attend college and also showed positive (though less significant) effects on teen birth and marriage. RCT estimates of earnings effects are imprecise. However, using a larger dataset of program administrative records, we develop a supplementary research design comparing matched versus unmatched applicants that replicates key findings from the RCT, and also reveals significant long-term positive earnings gains from program participation on the order of 20%. Through the lens of a model in which adults of differing socioeconomic status influence kids’ decision-making, we estimate that mentors may have the potential to mitigate on the order of 2/3 of the disadvantage that ordinarily hampers low-income childrens’ socioeconomic trajectories in adulthood. Although our estimates suggest that mentoring programs will not fully equalize economic opportunities for disadvantaged youth, the program’s relatively low costs and substantial benefits may place it among the most cost-effective interventions of its type to be evaluated.
To learn more about Dr. Alex Bell, visit his department homepage here:
Alex Bell | California Policy Lab

CU Workshop Announcement: Advancing social science research on abortion
2023-12-06 08:00 - 2023-12-08 17:00
Advancing social science research on abortion: demographic methods and perspectives – CU Population Center (colorado.edu)
Dates: December 6-8, 2023
Steering Committee: Leslie Root, Amanda Stevenson, Jane Menken, Sara Yeatman, Stefanie Mollborn, and Katie Genadek
Location: Hybrid, online and in-person at CU Population Center, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder
Since the Supreme Court ended the era of the federally protected right to abortion with their decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health in June 2022, there has been increasing interest in the social sciences in studying abortion and related topics in reproductive health.
We are pleased to announce a workshop for graduate students and early-career researchers who are newer to the field of reproductive health and committed to advancing the social science of abortion in the U.S. using demographic methods. The target audience for this workshop has a strong quantitative background, some familiarity with demography, and relatively little experience working with abortion data.
The meeting will feature:

training in demographic methods that can be applied to abortion research.
talks by leading scholars presenting exciting new directions in demographic research on abortion.
opportunities to engage in scholarly community through a workshop Slack and virtual follow-up.
meetings where small groups of participants can develop and present research.

The target audience for this workshop are graduate students and early-career researchers with a strong quantitative background, some familiarity with demography, and relatively little experience working with abortion data.
Space for the workshop is limited.
The workshop application is available here. We aim to make decisions by mid-October, so for full consideration, please submit by Monday, October 9ᵗʰ.
This workshop is funded by the University of Colorado
Population Center (CUPC), and further benefits from
administrative, research, and/or computing support
through the CUPC, funded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver
National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (P2CHD066613). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH, CUPC, or the University of Colorado.

Clémence Tricaud, University of California, Los Angeles, "Gender and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Crisis Response"
2023-11-29 12:00 - 13:15
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.
