California Center for Population Research

Bagel Hour
2024-10-21 10:00 - 11:00, 2024-10-14 10:00 - 11:00, 2024-10-07 10:00 - 11:00, 2024-09-30 10:00 - 11:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CCPR Break Room
Join CCPR affiliates for bagels from Noah’s Bagels and get to know one another in a casual setting.
Bagels are served in the CCPR Break Room.

Workshop: Jake Anderson, University of California, Los Angeles, "Transitioning to Industry: Tech Pathways for Academics"
2024-10-17 15:00 - 16:30 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Description:
Join us for a session on navigating the transition from academia to industry, specifically in tech roles. Led by Jake Anderson, a CCPR trainee from the Economics department who has worked as a Data Science Manager and Senior Data Scientist in San Francisco, this workshop will guide you through reframing academic projects and experience to highlight impact and value. We will discuss the typical tech interview process, covering recruiter interactions, technical screens, and multi-stage interviews. Learn about the distinctions in interview focus across major tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, Uber and Google, and explore the nuances of different roles, job titles, and career tracks. Attendees will gain insights into salary negotiations (including stock and bonuses), team matching, and what to expect in the first few years in industry, including performance evaluations and promotion pathways. This session is a must for those considering a career pivot into tech or looking to better understand the tech hiring landscape!
One recent candidate from a top 10 PhD program who got several industry offers wrote: “Marketing yourself effectively is crucial in tech, yet this is a skill that many economists and other academics lack. Jake brings years of experience and understands how to translate between the academic and industry spaces. My resume got many compliments after Jake overhauled it, and his guidance was critical for securing interviews and internships that ultimately converted into full-time offers. Jake has abundant knowledge on non-econ science roles that many tech economists are unfamiliar with. I highly recommend working with Jake.”

Anne Karing, University of Chicago, "Incentives and Motivation Crowd-Out: Experimental Evidence from Childhood Immunization"
2024-10-16 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Anne Karing’s research focuses on the economics of healthcare delivery and health-seeking behaviors in low-income countries, applying insights from psychology. Her core work examines how social signaling motives can change behaviors, in ways that benefit individual health and society. She has implemented large-scale field experiments that examine the effectiveness of social signaling incentives in increasing the demand for childhood immunization and deworming treatment in Sierra Leone and Kenya. As part of this research, Anne also conducts follow-up surveys with cohorts previously exposed to incentives to assess their potential crowd-out effects on motivation. Other branches of her work include markets of medicines, including how formal and illegal markets interact, and the relevance of social preferences and competition in taming market failures among formal providers. Karing earned a BA with honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics as well as an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. She completed a PhD in Economics at University of California, Berkeley and a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University.

Incentives and Motivation Crowd-Out: Experimental Evidence from Childhood Immunization

Abstract: We investigate the impact of incentives and their withdrawal on parents’ decisions to vaccinate subsequent children. We follow up with parents three years after exposure to a bracelet incentive given to children for timely vaccination in Sierra Leone. Our analysis leverages the design of an experiment in which clinics were randomly assigned to offer incentives or not. Since only parents with a newborn at the time of the experiment were eligible for the incentive, we can exploit individual variation in exposure within clinics. First, we find that eligibility for an incentive for an earlier child reduces parents’ motivation to vaccinate their subsequent child on time, with reductions of 5 to 11 percent in the number of timely visits compared to unexposed parents. There are no effects on vaccination rates by 15 months of age, suggesting that parents delay vaccination rather than abstaining altogether. Second, parents living in communities where incentives were offered but who were ineligible for them show no effects, ruling out the possibility that changes in community norms or clinic practices drive the results. Third, incentives that signaled being a caring parent do not lead to adverse effects. Using causal forest analysis and testing for differences in knowledge and practices around immunization, we rule out that negative effects are due to learning from the removal of incentives. Instead, we conclude that the exposure to incentives crowded out parents’ intrinsic motivation by altering their self-perception or relationship with vaccination.
An audio recording of Dr. Karing’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Workshop: CCPR Computing Orientation
2024-10-09 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
A recording of Roger Silanoe’s presentation may be accessed here.
The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.

Welcome Back to CCPR
2024-10-02 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg

17th Annual All-California Labor Economics Conference.
2024-09-12 - 2024-09-13
UCLA will host the 2024 All-California Labor Economics Conference (ACLEC). We define labor broadly and will consider submissions in a broad set of areas in applied microeconomics. The conference will take place at UCLA on Thursday and Friday, September 12-13, 2024.
Click here for more details.

The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) 2024
2024-06-24 08:00 - 2024-07-03 17:00 | CCPR Seminar Room, 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
From June 24 to July 3, 2024 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 Organizing Committee
Jennie Brand, Professor, Sociology and Statistics
Dora Costa, Professor, Economics
Patrick Heuveline, Professor, Sociology, and International Institute
Randall Kuhn, Professor, Community Health Sciences
For more information about the event go here: https://sicss.io/2024/ucla/

Mare lecture | Johnny Huynh
2024-06-05 12:00 - 13:20
Johnny Huynh is an applied microeconomist specializing in health and labor economics, and his research uses the methods of causal inference to address policy-relevant questions about inequality in health. Johnny will present his paper, “Do Cash Transfers Narrow Health Disparities? Evidence from Veterans with Disabilities.” Johnny will be joining the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Fall 2024 as an Assistant Professor. His UCLA thesis is advised by Adriana Lleras-Muney, Kathleen McGarry, and Martha Bailey.

Rob Mare Student Lecture 2024
2024-06-05 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
A recording of this event can be found here.

Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2024-05-29 12:00 - 13:15
Biography: Parag A. Pathak is the Class of 1922 Professor of Economics at MIT, founding co-director of the NBER Working Group on Market Design, and founder of MIT’s Blueprint Labs. His research is on education and market design. He is currently a co-editor of Econometrica and the recipient of the 2018 John Bates Clark Medal.
Abstract: TBA

Peter Hull, Brown University, "Formula Instruments" (STC Workshop)
2024-05-22 13:00 - 16:00 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Peter Hull is a Professor of Economics at Brown University, a Faculty Research Fellow in the NBER Labor Studies, Education, and Health Care programs in Labor Studies, and the econometrics editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics. His research spans a variety of topics in applied econometrics, education, health care, discrimination, and criminal justice. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2023 in recognition of this work.
Formula Instruments
Abstract:
Many studies in economics use instruments or treatments which combine a set of exogenous shocks with other predetermined variables by a known formula. Examples include shift-share instruments, measures of social or spatial spillovers, and treatments capturing eligibility for a public policy. This workshop reviews recent econometric tools for this setting, which leverage the assignment process of the exogenous shocks and the structure of the formula for identification. Practical insights will be illustrated with two empirical applications and a coding lab.

All-UC Demography Conference on May 16-17, 2024.
2024-05-16 08:00 - 2024-05-17 19:00
The California Center for Population Research (CCPR) will host The All-UC Demography Conference on May 16-17, 2024.
Let us know if you’ll be attending! Click here to register
This event is open to all University of California faculty and graduate students as well as all researchers affiliated with UC population and poverty centers:
The Berkeley Population Center (UC Berkeley)
The Broom Center for Demography (Santa Barbara)
The California Center for Population Research (Los Angeles)
The Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (Berkeley)
The Center on Gender Equity and Health (San Diego)
The Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy (Irvine)
The Center for Poverty Research (Davis)
The event will include a keynote address, oral sessions with discussants, and a poster session with best poster awards.
Click here for more Information

Christopher Walters, University of California, Berkeley (STC Workshop), Title: Empirical Bayes and large-scale inference.
2024-05-15 13:00 - 16:00 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Christopher Walters is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Walters joined the faculty at Berkeley after completing his PhD in economics at MIT in 2013. He is also a Research Associate in the NBER programs on education and labor studies, an IZA Research Fellow and an affiliate of JPAL-North America and MIT’s Blueprint Labs. His academic research focuses on topics in labor economics, the economics of education, and applied econometrics, including work on school choice, early childhood programs, methods for evaluating school quality, experimental measurement of labor market discrimination, causal inference, and empirical Bayes methods.
Abstract: This workshop will cover empirical Bayes methods for studying heterogeneity, estimating individual effects, and making decisions in settings with many unit-specific parameters. Examples include studies of school, teacher, and physician quality; neighborhood effects on economic mobility; firm effects on wages; employer-specific labor market discrimination; and individualized treatment effect predictions and policy recommendations. Topics will include methods for quantifying variation in effects, empirical Bayes shrinkage, connections to machine learning methods, and large-scale inference tools for multiple testing and decision-making. The lecture will be accompanied by coding examples.
A recording of this event can be found here

Gabriella Conti, University of College London
2024-05-08 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: TBA
Abstract: TBA

Jeff Weaver, University of Southern California, Hiring Subsidies for the Disadvantaged: Evidence from the Work Opportunity Tax Credit
2024-05-01 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Jeff Weaver is an Assistant Professor in the department of economics at USC. He is an applied microeconomist working on a range of topics in development economics, political economy, and labor economics. His past work has examined topics such as public service delivery in India, the evolution of cultural institutions, and crime and low wage labor markets in the United States.
A recording of this event can be found here.

Andrew Penner, University of California, Irvine, "The Academic and Socioemotional Effects of Advanced Mathematics Coursetaking"
2024-04-24 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography
Andrew Penner is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Penner’s research examines how society creates categories and sorts people into them, and focuses on the consequences of these categorization processes for inequality. At UCI, Penner serves as the director of the Center for Administrative Data Analysis, and much of Penner’s ongoing research uses novel administrative data infrastructure to understand how schools do and don’t prepare students to thrive as adults.
The Academic and Socioemotional Effects of Advanced Mathematics Coursetaking
Abstract
Although existing research suggests that students benefit on a range of outcomes when they enroll in early algebra classes, policy efforts that accelerate algebra enrollment for large numbers of students often have negative effects. We explore this divergence, providing regression discontinuity evidence on the effects of early algebra placement showing that early algebra boosts subsequent math and English Language Arts (ELA) outcomes. We then investigate how early algebra might affect ELA outcomes. We find no effects of early algebra placement on social and emotional learning outcomes, and no effects on the characteristics of the ELA teachers students were exposed to. But we do find large and substantively meaningful effects of early algebra placement on students’ peer composition. This finding provides insights into why policies aimed at accelerating algebra broadly may fail, and why early algebra affects students’ achievement beyond mathematics.

PAA 2024 Annual Meeting at Columbus, Ohio
2024-04-17 - 2024-04-20 | Columbus, Ohio Hyatt Regency Columbus, Hyatt Regency Columbus, Columbus, OH, United States
Details to be added later.

Student PAA Practice Talk (Development Workshop)
2024-04-10 12:00 - 13:15
Details TBA

The Digital Migrant Health Record: DR. Maria Elena Ramos Tovar
2024-04-08 13:00 - 14:00 | YRL, Room 23167
Electronic patient records (EPRs) have been shown to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare delivery. While developed countries are ahead in this transition, with nearly all hospital settings relying on EPRs, developing countries are still lagging. Without EPRs, physicians struggle to have a clear medical history of patients; consequently, healthcare quality and efficiency are compromised. This is particularly true for migrants, a subset of the population that could benefit from EPRs as cross-border mobility often entails numerous threats to the safety, integrity, and health.
This presentation will showcase the project “Right and access to health for migrants: Health care trajectories of people on the move through cities in northeastern Mexico and the Texas Valley region,” or “Migrant Health Trajectories” for short. The first intervention of the project is the creation and implementation of an EPR called “Expediente Digital Migrante” (Migrant Digital Record Home | Trayectoria de Salud Migrante). This instrument is designed to document and monitor the physical and mental health of migrants in transit; it comprises clinical history, medical notes, results of physical and clinical examinations, and depression scales. The EPR can be accessed across different countries and by multiple providers. So far, the EPR system has been implemented in 7 migrant shelters across the Mexican states of Nuevo Leon (5), Coahuila (1), and Reynosa (1), all in the Northeast region, and more than 2900 patients have been registered in the system.

Rebecca Dizon-Ross, University of Chicago, "Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise"
2024-04-03 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Rebecca Dizon-Ross is a development economist and applied microeconomist with an interest in human capital. Much of her current work is on the demand side, aiming to understand the determinants of households’ investments in health and education and to evaluate interventions to increase investment. Rebecca is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Before joining Booth, Dizon-Ross was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University.
Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise
Abstract:
Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to misreport their type. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer a menu of policy choices and make it incentive-compatible for participants to choose the “right” variant. Using a field experiment that personalized incentives for exercise among 6,800 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that personalizing with an incentive-compatible choice menu substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect of incentives on exercise by 80% without increasing program costs relative to a one-size-fits-all benchmark. Personalizing with mechanism design also performs well relative to another potential strategy for personalization: assigning policy variants based on observables.

F31 Predoctoral NIH Funding Panel
2024-03-14 12:00 - 13:00
Join us on Thursday, March 14 from noon- 1 pm
Please RSVP and submit questions for the panelist beforehand using this form.
Location: UCLA CCPR seminar room (4240A Public Affairs)
The panel will kick off with a brief introduction, setting the stage for a discussion about NIH funding opportunities focused specifically on predoctoral F31 grants. Attendees will gain a comprehensive overview of the funding mechanisms and application procedures, empowering them to navigate the NIH funding landscape with confidence.
Our panelists comprise both current applicants and F31 grant recipients: Andrew Hess (Econ), Eunhee Park (Community Health Science), and Esmeralda Melgoza (Community Health Sciences). They will highlight key considerations for crafting successful grant proposals, including tips for writing compelling narratives, addressing reviewer feedback, and maximizing impact. Whether you’re a seasoned researcher or new to the world of grant writing, this event promises to equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to secure NIH funding for your research endeavors.
Following the presentations, attendees will have the opportunity to participate in a dynamic Q&A session, where they can seek clarification and engage directly with our panelists. Don’t miss this chance to gain valuable insights, connect with fellow researchers, and take your NIH funding journey to the next level.
Cookies will be provided.

Conrad Miller, University of California, Berkeley, “Class Disparities and Discrimination in Traffic Stops and Searches”
2024-03-13 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Conrad Miller is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Haas School of Business and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a labor economist who studies inequality between social groups. His research pursues three broad research questions: (1) what role do firms play in producing labor market inequality between social groups? (2) what are the consequences of discrimination? and (3) what are the effects of policy responses to discrimination?
“Class Disparities and Discrimination in Traffic Stops and Searches”
Abstract: We document class disparities and discrimination in the incidence of police searches. Low-income motorists are more likely to be pursued in pretext stops and to be searched for contraband. Yet searches of low-income motorists are less likely to yield contraband. To isolate class-based discrimination, we show that motorists stopped in multiple vehicles are more likely to be searched when stopped in a vehicle that signals they are low-income. Overall contraband yield would increase if police did not engage in vehicle-based profiling. We provide suggestive evidence that lower hassle costs associated with arrests of low-income motorists help to explain trooper behavior.
A recording of this event can be found here.

Nora Daniels, Associate Director, UCLA Corporate and Foundation Relations
2024-03-13 11:00 - 12:00
Nora Daniels, Associate Director, UCLA Corporate and Foundation Relations will join our bagel hour at 11 am on March 13, 2024. Nora supports faculty across the college by identifying, cultivating, soliciting, and stewarding private foundation prospects for funding their research, programs, and initiatives. This support includes (but is not limited to): proposal development and internal approvals (OCGA, academic leadership), RFP applications, cultivating relationships with foundation program officers, and foundation strategy development.

Brittany Chambers, University of California, Davis, "The Solutions are in the Community: Centering Black Women’s Voices to Advance Birth Equity"
2024-03-06 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Dr. Brittany Chambers Butcher is a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California, Davis. She is a community health scientist whose program of research merges critical and public health theories to partner with Black women and birthing people to better understand, operationalize and dismantle racism. Dr. Chambers Butcher uses a community research model in her work to #listentoblackwomen to reconceptualize structural racism and the way it shows up in Black communities to contribute to adverse maternal and infant health outcomes. Building on this work, Dr. Chambers Butcher received a competitive two-year UCSF-Kaiser Permanente Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) K12 award to collect formative data to co-develop racial equity training for perinatal care providers with Black women and perinatal providers of color. She now was a K01 focused on pilot testing this racial equity training among perinatal providers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Solutions are in the Community: Centering Black Women’s Voices to Advance Birth Equity
Abstract:
Structural racism has been identified as a root cause of maternal and infant health inequities experienced by Black women and birthing people, and their children. In effort to better understand and dismantle racism, centering community voice is essential. This presentation will share a community research model used to advance birth equity and example projects implementing this model to: (1) develop a conceptual framework of structural racism from the perspectives of Black women; (2) develop and pilot test a racial equity training for perinatal care providers; and (3) developing a healing toolkit for community researchers.

Los Angeles' Replication Games
2024-02-28 08:45 - 16:00 | Room 4240A, 4th Floor, Public Affairs Building, 337 Charles Young Dr., LA, CA 90095
We are looking for researchers, post-docs, and PhD students
interested in a one-day replication challenge.
Participants will be granted co-authorship on a meta-paper
combining the reproductions and replications, and will have the
opportunity to publish their work. Participants will be matched based
on field, and a study from a leading social science journal will be
assigned to each team based on interests.
The event will take place at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Virtual participants are also welcome. The event is sponsored by the
California Center for Population Research.
Interested researchers and/or teams should send their field
of study and preferred statistical software to:
ABEL BRODEUR
abrodeur@uottawa.ca
Pre-games virtual meeting slides/recording can be found here.
More information about the event can be found here

Dr. Florencia Torche “Doing Gender and the Surname Choices of Married Women”
2024-02-21 15:00 - 17:00 | 279 Haines Hall

CANCELLED: Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago, "Machine learning as a tool for hypothesis generation"
2024-02-21 12:00 - 13:15 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography:
Jens Ludwig is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, co-director of the Education Lab, and co-director of the NBER’s working group on the economics of crime. He is on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
“Machine learning as a tool for hypothesis generation”
Abstract:
While hypothesis testing is a highly formalized activity, hypothesis generation remains largely informal. We propose a systematic procedure to generate novel hypotheses about human behavior, which uses the capacity of machine learning algorithms to notice patterns people might not. We illustrate the procedure with a concrete application: judge decisions about who to jail. We begin with a striking fact: The defendant’s face alone matters greatly for the judge’s jailing decision. In fact, an algorithm given only the pixels in the defendant’s mugshot accounts for up to half of the predictable variation. We develop a procedure that allows human subjects to interact with this black-box algorithm to produce hypotheses about what in the face influences judge decisions. The procedure generates hypotheses that are both interpretable and novel: They are not explained by demographics (e.g. race) or existing psychology research; nor are they already known (even if tacitly) to people or even experts. Though these results are specific, our procedure is general. It provides a way to produce novel, interpretable hypotheses from any high dimensional dataset (e.g. cell phones, satellites, online behavior, news headlines, corporate filings, and high-frequency time series). A central tenet of our paper is that hypothesis generation is in and of itself a valuable activity, and hope this encourages future work in this largely “prescientific” stage of science.
