California Center for Population Research

PAA Student Practice Talks
2021-04-28 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
12:00 – 12:30 Nathan Hoffmann, presentation title: “A ‘Win-Win Exercise’? Eastern European Children in Western Europe”

12:30 – 1:00 Brett McCully, presentation title: “Immigration, Legal Status, and Illegal Trade”
Abstract: Nearly $2 trillion worth of illegal goods are trafficked across international borders every year, generating violence and other social costs along the way. Some have controversially linked illegal trafficking to immigrants, yet an appropriate immigration policy response is unclear. In this paper, I use novel data on nearly 10,000 confiscations of illegal drugs in Spain to study how immigrants and immigration policy affect the pattern and scale of illegal drug trafficking. To identify the causal effect of immigrants on trafficking, I construct an instrumental variable that interacts variation in total immigrant inflows into Spain by origin country with the fraction of immigrants inflowing into a province. I find that a 10% increase in the population of immigrants from a given origin country relative to the mean raises the value of drugs trafficked from the origin country confiscated in a given province by 12%. Moreover, this relationship is driven entirely by immigrants without legal status. To better understand the role of legal status, I exploit an extraordinary regularization of nearly half a million immigrants in 2005. Event study estimates suggest that granting immigrants legal status results in a long-run decline in drug trafficking, corresponding to the acquisition of citizenship by the immigrants.
1:00 – 1:30 Angela Clague, presentation title: “The Mediating Effects of Household Resources in Orphan Disadvantage in Cambodia”

CCPR Census Workshop Series Part 2: Editing, Imputing, and Maintaining Privacy
2021-04-21 12:00 - 13:00
Instructor: Mike Tzen
In this 2nd CCPR Census Workshop (2 of 3), we’ll take a look at some of the ways the US Census Bureau, edits, imputes, and maintains privacy of the 2020 decennial census data before releasing it to the public. For practical reasons, we’ll spend more time on imputation, as attendees will most likely find the need for (or to deal with) imputation in their own research projects.
Part 1 and its slides can be viewed below
https://ccpr.ucla.edu/event/ccpr-census-workshop-part-1-your-research-2020-census/
Part 2 slides are below
https://ucla.app.box.com/v/slides-cens-pt2-eip

PAA Student Practice Talks
2021-04-14 12:00 - 13:30
12:00 – 12:40 Shuchi Goyal, presentation title:”A Practical Revealed Preference Model for Separating Preferences and Availability Effects in Marriage Formation”
Many problems in demography require models for partnership formation that separate latent preferences for partners from the availability of partners. We consider a model for matchings within a bipartite population where individuals have utility for people based on known and unknown characteristics. People can form a partnership or remain unpartnered. The model represents both the availability of potential partners of different types and preferences of individuals for such people. We develop Menzel’s (2015) framework to estimate preference parameters based on sample survey data on partnerships and population composition.
We conduct simulation studies based on new marriages observed in the Survey for Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to show that, for realistic population sizes, the model recovers preference parameters that are invariant under different population availabilities. We also develop confidence intervals that have correct coverage. This model can be applied in family demography to understand individual preferences given different availabilities.
12:40-1:20 Bernard Koch, presentation title: “Deep Learning of Potential Outcomes”

SSCERT Workshop: Practical Web Technologies for Social Scientists
2021-04-08 13:00 - 14:30
Practical Web Technologies for Social Scientists
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2021
Time: 1:00pm – 2:30pm
Instructor: Neal Fultz
This workshop will introduce the alphabet soup of technologies powering the modern web; TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, JSON, REST APIs, OAUTH, SSL, AWS, among others. Attendees will build up enough background knowledge to begin scraping data from the web. R/Python/JS will be demonstrated, but the concepts are reasonably generic.
Registration: https://calendar.library.ucla.edu/event/7594317

CCPR Workshop: Computing Resources for Demographers - What's Available, How to Access Them, and When to Use Them
2021-04-07 12:00 - 13:00
Instructor: Matt Lahmann
Instructor: Mike Tzen
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 show you how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

"Including Males: Improving Sexual and Reproductive Health for Female Adolescents," Manisha Shah, UCLA
2021-03-31 12:00 - 13:30
Manisha Shah, UCLA
Abstract: Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of unplanned pregnancy and intimate partner violence across the globe. We implement a randomized controlled trial offering females free access to contraceptives, behavior change programming to male partners through soccer, and a goal-setting activity around staying healthy in order to improve female adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) outcomes in Tanzania. We find that offering male partners a soccer intervention, which educates and inspires young men to make better SRH choices, reduces female reports of intimate partner violence (IPV). In addition, we find that female adolescents who participate in the goal-setting activity also report decreases in intimate partner violence. Impacts are larger among females who were already sexually active at baseline. Supply side factors such as access to free contraceptives have no significant impact on adolescent SRH outcomes.
Bio: Manisha Shah is Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Shah also serves as Director of the Global Lab for Research in Action. Shah is also a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action, The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor.
More on Prof. Shah
A recording of Dr. Shah’s presentation is available here.

"Migration and the Labor Market Impact of COVID-19," Mushfiq Mobarak, Yale University
2021-03-10 12:00 - 13:30
“Migration and the Labor Market Impact of COVID-19”
Mushfiq Mobarak, Yale University
In this talk, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak will present the findings from a series of recent studies related to the consequences of COVID-19. The studies analyze the impact of the pandemic on outcomes such as employment, income, food security, including on vulnerable groups such as refugees and migration-dependent households. They also assess attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination and interventions to promote mask use. The findings have important policy implications on providing emergency support while reforming social protection programs and creating income-generating opportunities to build the resilience of poor households. They will also inform the global effort to promote preventive health behavior and vaccine uptake.
Paper 1: “Falling living standards during the COVID-19 crisis: Quantitative evidence from nine developing countries”
Abstract
Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines), and Latin America (Colombia). We document declines in employment and income in all settings beginning March 2020. The share of households experiencing an income drop ranges from 8 to 87% (median, 68%). Household coping strategies and government assistance were insufficient to sustain precrisis living standards, resulting in widespread food insecurity and dire economic conditions even 3 months into the crisis. We discuss promising policy responses and speculate about the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups. This paper may be accessed here.
Paper 2: “Migration and the Labor Market Impacts of COVID-19”
Abstract
We report the excess economic vulnerabilities of migration-dependent households during the COVID-19 pandemic using detailed microdata from Bangladesh and Nepal. Leveraging experimental and observa tional variation in prior migration status, we observe 25% greater declines in earnings and fourfold greater prevalence of food insecurity among migrant households since April 2020. Causes evident in the data include lower mobility, less remittance income, and greater health risk and stigma regarding migrants car rying COVID. We document the global scope of this problem by compiling a large set of secondary data to show that labor migration is extremely prevalent in less developed countries, and that the causal economic return to such migration is large. We conclude with suggestions for policy to alleviate the challenges faced by migrants during the pandemic. New mobility restrictions imposed to limit contagion may lead the vulnerabilities to persist for a prolonged period, and this population requires special policy attention.
Paper 3: “Community-Wide Mask Promotion: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Rural Bangladesh”
Abstract
Background: A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that face masks can slow the
spread of COVID-19 and save lives.
Methods: We conducted a cluster-randomized trial of community-level mask promotion in
rural Bangladesh involving 341,830 adults in 600 villages. Villages were paired and one in
each pair was randomly assigned to intervention or control. In intervention villages, with the
active support of local leaders, we distributed masks (surgical or cloth) to every household and
employed various interventions to promote mask use at mosques, markets, and other public
places multiple times per week. There were no intervention activities in the control villages.
The objective was to assess the degree to which the intervention and cross-randomizations
could increase proper (covering nose and mouth) wearing of face masks. This analysis is part
of larger study evaluating the effect of mask-wearing on transmission of SARS-CoV-2. In this
paper the primary outcome was the prevalence of proper mask-wearing. It was not possible to
blind participants or surveillance staff to the intervention.
Results: There were 64,937 households in the intervention group and 64,183 households in
the control group; study recruitment has ended. In the control group, proper mask-wearing
is practiced by 13% of those observed. Our intervention increased proper mask-wearing by
28.6 percentage points (95% CI: 26.1%-31.1%) over the 2-10 week length of the intervention.
Physical distancing, measured as the fraction of individuals at least one arm’s length apart,
also increased by 6 percentage points (95% CI: 4.9%-7.6%). Mask type (surgical or cloth),
text reminders, public signage commitments, monetary or non-monetary incentives, altruistic
messaging or verbal commitments had no additional effect on people’s propensity to wear
masks. Blue surgical masks were more likely to be worn than green, and purple cloth masks
were more likely to be worn than red. We observe larger increases in mask-wearing among
men and in villages where mask-wearing was initially low. No adverse events were reported
during the study period.
Conclusions: Our intervention demonstrates a scalable and cost-effective method to promote
mask adoption and save lives. Our cross-randomizations suggest this increase can be achieved
without incentives that require costly monitoring, that aesthetic design choices and colors can
influence mask-wearing, and that surgical masks with greater filtration efficiency can be a
cost-effective alternative to cloth masks (1/3 the cost) and equally likely to be worn. Implementing
these interventions – including distribution of free masks, information campaign, reminders,
encouragement – costs $2.30-$3.75 per villager, or between $8 and $13 per person adopting
a mask. Combined with existing estimates of the efficacy of masks in preventing COVID-19
deaths, this implies that the intervention cost $28,000-$66,000 per life saved. Beyond reducing
the transmission of COVID-19, mask distribution is likely to be a cost-effective strategy to
prevent future respiratory disease outbreaks.
Biography: Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at Innovations for Poverty Action, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE.
More on Prof. Mobarak
A recording of Dr. Mobarak’s presentation may be accessed here.

"Stress, happiness, and maternity leave at childbirth," Mauricio Avendano Pabon, King's College London
2021-03-03 12:00 - 13:30
“Stress, happiness, and maternity leave at childbirth”
Mauricio Avendano Pabon, King’s College London
Abstract: This study examines the impact of childbirth on both stress and happiness. We use unique data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which collects full retrospective life histories for women aged 50 years and older in 12 European countries. Using an instrumental variable fixed effect approach, we show that the first two years after childbirth lead to a significant increase in the risk of severe stress, while simultaneously increasing the probability of reporting a distinct period of happiness. We show that longer maternity leave entitlements leading to longer job interruptions significantly decrease the risk of stress: A period of eight weeks of maternity leave is sufficient to counterbalance the effect of childbirth on stress. Our results highlight the critical impact of maternity leave policies on the experience of childbirth and the wellbeing of working mothers.
Biography: Mauricio Avendano Pabon is a Professor of Public Policy and Global Health and Director of the Institute of Gerontology at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Harvard University. Before joining King’s, Mauricio was Associate Professorial Research Fellow and Deputy Director of LSE Health at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2011-2015). He has been David Bell Fellow at Harvard University (2008-2010), and Assistant Professor at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands (2006-2010). He is also a network associate of the McArthur Foundation Research Network on an Ageing Society.
For more information about Dr. Avendano Pabon click here.
The seminar recording may be accessed here.

"Randomized Regulation: The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Health Markets," Jishnu Das, Georgetown University
2021-02-24 12:00 - 13:30
“Randomized Regulation: The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Health Markets”
Jishnu Das, Georgetown University
Abstract: Working with the Kenyan Cabinet and Ministry of Health, we experimentally evaluated the market-level impacts of healthcare regulation in settings with public and private providers. We randomly allocated 273 markets with 1258 facilities to treatment and control arms and in treatment arms, facilities were inspected to assess compliance with minimum patient safety standards with the potential for closure. To accurately capture how regulation functions in low-capacity environments, inspections and facility closures were carried out by the government using their own staff.
The intervention (a) increased compliance with the patient safety checklist in both public and private clinics (more so in the latter); (b) increased closures of clinics without licenses and (c) reallocated patients from private to public clinics, primarily in markets with a facility closure. A decomposition approach shows that 93% of the increase in compliance with patient safety measures was due to improvements within facilities, rather than exits or changes in market shares. The intervention had no impact on patients’ out-of-pocket payments, and we find no evidence of declines in facility use, either in the aggregate or for poorer patients.
We then examine three classes of mechanisms: An information channel, a compliance channel and a vertical differentiation channel due to Ronen (1991). We do not find evidence for the information channel and weak evidence for the compliance channel. Quantile treatment effects suggest that, consistent with Ronen (1991), there were quality improvements across the quality spectrum.
Our study thus brings the regulatory function of the state under the ambit of experimental methods and shows that even in low-capacity settings, regulations and inspections can improve the quality of care, as measured by compliance with patient safety measures.
Biography: Jishnu Das is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Jishnu’s work focuses on health and education in low and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on social markets, or common, but complex, conflagrations of public and private education and health providers operating in a small geographical space.
A recording of the seminar can be accessed here.
More on Prof. Das

"Banks, alternative institutions, and the spatial-temporal ecology of racial inequality," Mario Luis Small, Harvard University
2021-02-10 12:00 - 13:30
Mario Luis Small, Harvard University
Research has made clear that racial inequality is affected by neighborhood conditions. One important condition is the accessibility of financial establishments. We examine how living in minority neighborhoods affects ease of access to conventional banks vs. to alternative financial institutions (AFIs) such as check cashers and payday lenders, which are often more expensive and have at times been called predatory. Based on more than 6 million queries, we compute the difference in the time required to walk, drive, or take public transit to the nearest bank vs. the nearest AFI from the middle of every block in each of 19 of the nation’s largest cities. Results suggest that race is strikingly more important than class: even after numerous economic, demographic, and structural conditions are accounted for, the AFI is more often closer than the bank in well-off minority neighborhoods than in poo rwhite ones. Results are driven by not the absence of banks but the prevalence of AFIs in minority areas. Documented differences are so large that accounting for them on the basis of preferences—of differences in demand for AFIs by race—would be inconsistent with available evidence and highly unlikely. Additional survey data on preferences is consistent with these findings.
Biography: Pro. Small is the author of award-winning books and articles on networks, poverty, organizations, culture, methods, neighborhoods, institutions, and other topics. He is currently using large-scale administrative data to understand isolation in cities, studying how people use their networks to meet their needs, and exploring the epistemological foundations of qualitative research. His latest book is Someone To Talk To (Oxford). A study of how people decide whom to approach when seeking support, the book is an inquiry into human nature, a critique of network analysis, and a discourse on the role of qualitative research in the big-data era.
More on Prof. Small

The seminar recording may be accessed here.

Job Market Workshop
2021-02-03 12:00 - 13:30
Job Market Workshop
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Corrina Moucheraud is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management. She is a global health policy and systems researcher, focused on the question: how can we deliver high-quality, efficient, equitable, sustainable health services in low-resource, system-constrained settings? She conducts both quantitative and qualitative research, including with primary data (surveys, interviews, focus groups, clinical observation) and secondary data, as well as economic evaluation research such as cost-effectiveness analyses. Main topic areas include HIV, maternal health, and non-communicable diseases, and she primarily conducts research in sub-Saharan Africa.
To learn more about Dr. Moucheraud click here.
Michael Gaddis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA whose research focuses on racial discrimination, educational inequality, and mental health. He often uses experiments to examine levels of discrimination in employment and housing as well as the conditions under which racial discrimination occurs. In other research, he investigates differences in mental health conditions, stigma, and use of formal and informal mental health treatment on college campuses. Overall, his research provides evidence of inequality in the U.S. related to race, social class, and education.
To learn more about Dr. Gaddis click here.
Rodrigo Pinto an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of California, Los Angeles. Pinto has a series of papers on the economics of human capital accumulation of early childhood interventions and policy evaluations. His research focuses on modeling, inference, cost-benefit analysis, external validity and treatment effect estimation of social experiments. Among the experiments he has analyzed are the Perry Pre-school Intervention, High/Scope Comparison Study, Abecedarian Project, Nurse-Family Partnership, Moving to Opportunity, and Primeira Infancia Melhor (in Brazil). Pinto also studies the use causality and the use of revealed preference analysis to identify treatment effects in choice model with multiple choices and heterogeneous agents. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica and Science.
To learn more about Dr. Pinto click here.
The recording of the workshop may be accessed here.

"Models of Social Change: Principles and Methods of Age-Period-Cohort Analysis," Ethan Fosse, University of Toronto and Christopher Winship, Harvard University
2021-01-27 12:00 - 13:30
Ethan Fosse, University of Toronto and Christopher Winship, Harvard University
“Models of Social Change: Principles and Methods of Age-Period-Cohort Analysis”
Age-period-cohort (APC) analysis has a long, controversial history in sociology and demography. Despite nearly a century of research, there is little agreement on how to adequately analyze APC data. In this talk we discuss techniques for improving APC analysis. We begin with a brief overview of APC models, showing how one can interpret APC effects in a causal way. We then outline techniques that entail point identification using measured causes, such as mechanism-based models. Next, we discuss a general framework for APC analysis grounded in partial identification using bounds and sensitivity analyses of mechanism-based models. We conclude with future directions for research.
Biography: Ethan Fosse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto where he currently teaches courses on quantitative methods, social change, and computational social science. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University in the Department of Sociology and Department of Politics, where he designed and implemented a series of open-source statistical programming workshops.
More on Professor Fosse
Biography: Christopher Winship is the Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology, Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Program in Criminal Justice, the Ph.D. Program in Organizational Behavior, the Center for Public Leadership, the Safra Center for Ethics, and the Program in Social Inequality. He is past chair of both the Departments of Sociology at Harvard and Northwestern University. Prior to coming to Harvard in 1992, he was a Professor of Sociology, Statistics, and Economics at Northwestern. He has also been the Director of the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences at Northwestern and interim Director of the Economic Research Center at the University of Chicago. He has a BA in Sociology and Mathematics from Dartmouth College (1972) and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (1977).
More on Professor Winship
A recording of the seminar can be accessed here.
Drs. Winship and Fosse’s challenge may be accessed here.

"Interviewing Immigrants in Different Contexts," Cecilia Menjívar, UC Los Angeles
2021-01-13 12:00 - 13:30
“Interviewing Immigrants in Different Contexts”

Cecilia Menjívar, UCLA
In-depth, qualitative interviews often generate understandings of study participants’ lives that permit building explanations and expanding theorizing. Though the number of study participants included in studies that use this approach tend to be small and usually are selected non-randomly, the depth and richness of the data are believed to compensate for the small number of participants and their non-representative nature. This workshop will discuss the use of in-depth interviews in the study of immigration and immigrant communities, focusing on the variation of this method as it is used in different geographic and spatial settings and across broader political and structural contexts. It will rely on examples of studies in Central American immigrant communities in the United States.
Bio: Prof. Menjívar is a Professor and Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair, her research focuses on the structural roots of inequalities and on how individuals’ social locations shape their responses to such conditions.
More on Prof. Menjívar
A recording of the presentation can be found here.

Population-Based Modeling and Measurement of COVID-19
2020-12-09 12:00 - 14:00
“Population-Based Modeling and Measurement of COVID-19”
The recording of the event is available here.
Panelists:
Christina Ramirez, Prof. of Biostatistics UCLA
Mark Handcock, Prof. of Statistics UCLA
Patrick Heuveline, Prof. of Sociology UCLA
Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, Prof. of Community Health Sciences
For more information on panelists’ research, see:

Patrick Heuveline. Covid-19 will reduce US life expectancy at birth by more than one year in 2020. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.20243717v1

Mark Handcock and colleagues. Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic Transmission of 2019 Nover Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection: An Estimation from a Cluster of Confirmed Cases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3630119

Watson and colleagues. Fusing a Bayesian Case Velocity Model with Random Forest for Predicting COVID-19 in the U.S. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3594606

Di Xiong and colleagues. Pseudo-likelihood based logistic regression for estimating COVID-19 infection and case fatality rates by gender, race, and age in California.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755436520300396?via%3Dihub

"Voting after Shelby: Did pre-clearance matter?" Ariel White, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2020-12-02 12:00 - 13:30
“Voting after Shelby: Did pre-clearance matter?”
Ariel White, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(co-authored with Mayya Komisarchik)
Abstract: Nearly five decades after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law was dramatically changed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The court effectively removed the “preclearance” process that had required places with a history of racial discrimination to get Justice Department approval before changing their voting procedures. Dissenting justices and voting-rights advocates feared that this decision could lead to massive changes to election administration and ultimately to lower rates of voter participation in minority communities. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of this decision on election practices and on Black and Hispanic voter registration and turnout. We use a combination of administrative data on registration and voting, survey data on mobilization and local election administration, and state legislative records to examine different facets of the voting rights landscape after the Court’s decision.
Bio: Prof. White research focuses on voting and voting rights, race, the criminal justice system, and bureaucratic behavior. Prof. White’s work uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people’s everyday interactions with government.
More on Prof. White

"Integrating Refugees: The Role of Language Training and Work Incentives," Giovanni Peri, UC Davis
2020-11-18 12:00 - 13:30
“Integrating Refugees: The Role of Language Training and Work Incentives”
Giovanni Peri, UC Davis
Abstract: Social and economic integration of refugees are key to their personal success and to producing positive effects in the host country. We evaluate the effects of a reform that substantially expanded language training for immigrants who obtained refugee status in Denmark on or after January 1, 1999. The same reform also temporarily decreased welfare benefits for a subgroup of them. Using a regression discontinuity design around the cutoff date we find positive and significant employment and earnings effects on the treated group, relative to the untreated group. Employment increased by 23 percent (4 percentage points) and yearly earnings increased by 34 percent (USD 2,500) when measured eighteen years after the start of the language program. We do not find any labor market effect of the reduction of welfare benefits. We find, however, evidence of temporarily higher property crimes for the group subject to lower benefits. The labor market effects are much stronger for individuals with Arabic/Dari mother language, consistently with a more crucial role of language training for speakers of languages that are very different from Danish. Finally, male children of treated refugees were more likely to complete lower secondary school and less likely to commit crime.
Bio: Giovanni Peri has expertise in labor economics, urban economics and the economics of international migrations. In addition to his appointment in the Department of Economics, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the founding director of the UC Davis Migration Research Cluster.
More on Prof. Peri

Census Research Data Center
2020-11-12 01:30 - 15:00
The RDC allows researchers to access confidential data from a growing number of federal statistical agencies, including the Census Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Internal Revenue Service. This includes more fine-grained regional information and variables with respect to public data and administrative sources only available at the RDC. The presentation will give an overview of available data on health, social, economic outcomes of individuals, the economic behavior of firms, workplace safety, and trade statistics, among others (see below for a high-level preview). We will also discuss the process of applying for data from different agencies. A Question and Answer session will take place at the end.In part due to the Commission on Evidence-Based Policy and in part due to increasing efforts to merge new data sources, the available information at the RDC is growing. It will likely grow further, among others because of potential new privacy restrictions on future Census data.Take this opportunity to learn about data available and the process to accessing it. If you cannot make it at the date and time, a video of the presentations and the slides will be posted on the RDC’s website.

Developmental Workshop Research Ethics: Data and Big Data Issues
2020-11-04 12:00 - 13:30
“Research Ethics: Data and Big Data Issues”
Prof. Anne Pebley
Chair and Distinguished Professor, Fred Bixby
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences
Professor, Department of Sociology
Director, Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health

CCPR Census Workshop Series Part 1: How the US 2020 Decennial Census Affects You and Your Research
2020-11-04 02:00 - 15:00
The two-word goal of “count everyone” is simply stated, but difficult. In this workshop we will give a broad overview of the many moving parts connected to the US decennial operation. Although fair apportionment is the primary motivator for a complete enumeration, we highlight how the 2020 decennial also serves as an important backbone for future products such as sample surveys used in demographic research. Along the discussion, we will point out difficulties along with the demographic and statistical methods used to address them. Participants are encouraged to discuss their experiences, questions and concerns.

Slides can be viewed at the link below
https://ucla.app.box.com/v/slides-census-pt1

"How Deep is the COVID-19 Recession? Evidence from Kenya and Beyond" Edward Miguel, UC Berkeley
2020-10-28 12:00 - 13:30
“How Deep is the COVID-19 Recession? Evidence from Kenya and Beyond”
Edward Miguel, UC Berkeley
Abstract: Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on the evolution of economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic remains scarce for most low and middle income countries, in part due to the limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. I will focus on novel evidence from a detailed and large-scale panel data collection effort in rural Kenya, documenting the evolution of living standards over time as well as the effects of an earlier cash transfer program. I also discuss results from over 30,000 respondents in an ensemble of 16 original household survey samples collected in nine countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The data documents declines in employment and income across socioeconomic strata beginning in March 2020, resulting in widespread food insecurity and the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups.
Bio: Prof. Miguel’s research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparent social science research.
More on Prof. Miguel

"Challenges with Using Simulation Models to Plan and Refine COVID Testing for High-risk Populations" Sanjay Basu, Harvard University
2020-10-21 12:00 - 13:30
“Challenges with Using Simulation Models to Plan and Refine COVID Testing for High-risk Populations”
Sanjay Basu, Harvard University
Abstract: Simulations models are frequently used during infectious disease outbreaks to guide policy and practice. This talk will discuss the use and refinement of COVID simulation models to help develop a testing network, define testing plans and refine them for high-risk populations–including homeless shelters, nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and similar congregate worksites–and address limitations and uncertainties presented by those models that were informed by implementation of their results.
Bio: Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD, is a primary care physician at Tenderloin Health Services—an integrated primary care, behavioral health, and substance use treatment clinic in San Francisco—and Director of Research at Collective Health.
More on Prof. Basu

"The political context and infant health in the United States" Florencia Torche, Stanford University
2020-10-14 12:00 - 13:30
“The political context and infant health in the United States”
Florencia Torche, Stanford University
Abstract: Political factors could have substantial consequences for the health and wellbeing of populations. In the United States, an important political factor is the party of the president. The two main parties differ in their ideologies and policy agendas, and these differences have sharpened since the 1960s. We examine the effect of prenatal exposure to the political party in office at the national level (president’s party) and the state level (governor’s party) on infant health between 1971 and 2018, considering the heterogeneity and timing of these effects. Fixed effects models show a beneficial effect of a Democratic president but no effect of a Democratic governor on birth outcomes. The benefit of in-utero exposure to a Democratic president is much stronger for Black infants than White infants. The effect of the president’s party does not materialize immediately after the inauguration. Rather, it takes approximately two years to fully emerge, and it remains elevated until the end of the party’s tenure in office. The effect is robust across specifications and only partially mediated by a battery of measurable social policies. Our findings suggest that the party in power is an important determinant of infant health, particularly among vulnerable populations.
Bio: Florencia Torche is a social scientist with substantive interests in social demography, stratification, and education. Professor Torche’s scholarship encompasses two related areas. A longer-term area of research studies inequality dynamics — the dynamics that result in persistence of inequality across generations — with a particular focus on educational attainment, assortative mating (who marries who), and the intergenerational transmission of wealth.
More on Prof. Torche

Race and Inequality: A Collaborative UCPop Event
2020-10-09 12:00 - 13:30
The Population Centers of the University of California – newly dubbed UCPop – is pleased to announce its inaugural (remote) meeting, “Race and Inequality: A Collaborative UCPop Event.”

Hosted by: UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara.

Keynote speaker: Tukufu Zuberi, “Demography of Race: The Propaganda of Demography”

Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Welcome and Introductions
2020-10-07 12:00 - 13:30
Please come join us to learn all about the California Center for Population Research!
This will be the kick-off event for the start of the upcoming 2020-2021 CCPR Seminar Series.

Book Talk: The Voucher Promise, Eva Rosen
2020-09-09 12:00 - 13:00
The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as “Section 8,” and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. While vouchers are a powerful tool with great promise, she demonstrates how the housing policy can replicate the very inequalities it has the power to solve.
In Los Angeles, approximately 57,000 households have Housing Choice Vouchers at a cost of $660 million in 2019. The last time the voucher waitlist was opened, for a 10-day period in 2017, the city received 188,000 applications for only 20,000 spots, highlighting the great demand for housing assistance in LA. Vouchers are awarded by lottery to households on the waitlist.
Join the Lewis Center on Sept. 9 for a conversation with Rosen about her new book, the successes and failures of the housing voucher program, and the role vouchers and other forms of housing assistance are playing during the COVID-19 pandemic and looming eviction crisis.
Moderator: Michael Lens
Associate Faculty Director, Lewis Center
Associate Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy
Event Info
Wednesday, Sept. 9
Noon – 1 p.m. PDT
REGISTER HERE

A Cross-Center Collaboration DemSemX
2020-08-21 12:00 - 13:00
The DemSemX is a new cross-center collaborative effort that will virtually bring together faculty and students from 9 U.S. population research centers (Bowling Green, Cornell, Michigan, Minnesota, Penn State, Texas, UCLA, UW-Madison, and Brown) to enhance scholarly interaction and graduate training across institutions. Leaders/senior faculty of these centers are all alumni of UW-Madison, where the weekly Demography Seminar (‘DemSem’) has for decades been a key feature of the intellectual community there, much as is our center’s regular seminar here. Together, we aim to take advantage of new virtual technologies and economies of scale to provide opportunities for scholarly interaction and training across our 9 centers.
Marta Bornstein, UCLA CCPR
“Infertility and Perceived Infertility in Malawi”

Nick DiRago, UCLA CCPR
“Spatial and Demographic Dynamics of the Diffusion of Land Banks and Relationship to Neighborhood Inequality”
Breakout rooms links and information available here: DemSemX Aug2020 Breakouts_corrected links

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
2020-06-15 - 2020-06-26 | 4240 Public Affairs Bldg
CCPR
June 15 – 26, 2020
4240 Public Affairs Building
The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is open to both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived).

Rob Mare Student Lecture
2020-06-03 12:00 - 13:30 | 4240 Public Affairs Bldg
TBD

A Cross-Center Collaboration DemSemX
2020-05-29 11:00 - 12:00
“Social Science Research and Social Distancing: COVID-19 Research Opportunities and Challenges”
Wendy D. Manning, Bowling Green State University
Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University. She is a family demographer, and her research examines how family members define and understand their obligations to each other in an era of increasing family complexity and diversity.
“What Can We Learn from Cities’ Stop/Start Patterns of Social Distancing in the 1918 Flu Pandemic”
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, University of Minnesota
Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate of the Minnesota Population Center at the
University of Minnesota. As a formal demographer and sociologist, her work integrates demographic methods designed to shift perspectives between population-level patterns and individual-level transitions between social statuses.
Plenary Session: 11am-12pm PT/1-2pm CT/2-3pm ET
Link to join: https://go.wisc.edu/4rtgy7
Breakout Rooms w/ Student Presentations: 12-1pm PT/2-3pm CT/3-4pm ET

Margot Kushel, University of California San Francisco
2020-05-20 12:00 - 13:30
“Aging Among the Homeless in the time of COVID: A crisis upon a crisis”
Abstract: In this talk, Margot Kushel will explore the aging of the homeless population, including causes, consequences and solutions. She will end the conversation with implications for the COVID-19 crisis.
Bio: Margot Kushel, MD is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations. Margot’s research focuses on reducing the burden of homelessness on health through examining efforts to prevent and end homelessness and mitigating the effects of housing instability on health care outcomes.
Co-sponsored with the California Policy Lab
Find out more about Prof. Kushel
Zoom Recording Available Here
Location: Presented remotely via Zoom
