CESR Events

The CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series will resume Monday, January 27, 2025 and conclude Monday, May 5, 2025.

Mondays
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, February 3
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Older adults with low income face a complex set of decisions regarding safety net programs and have particularly low take-up rates. We examine how means-tested public health insurance for working-age adults affects their choices once on Medicare. We find that people in low-income areas of Medicaid expansion states choose the Medicaid supplement more often than their non-expansion state counterparts; use more healthcare; and spend less out-of-pocket. Higher Medicaid supplement take-up increases Part Dand LIS take-up through automatic enrollment. Our results suggest that Medicaid exposure before 65 causes meaningful behavioral responses among the lowest-income beneficiaries when they age into Medicare.

Bio: M. Kate Bundorf is the J. Alexander McMahon Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and a core faculty member at Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy.  She is an economist, and her research focuses on public and private health insurance and health care provider markets.

Tuesday, February 4
11am – 12pm
TCC 227 and Zoom
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Abstract: This paper estimates the degree of substitution between personal and small business credit for U.S. entrepreneurs between 2009 and 2018 using a novel, individual-level dataset. We identify the effect of business credit supply shocks by exploiting geographic variation in the market share of large banks, which sharply reduced credit supply to small businesses after the 2008 financial crisis. This contraction decreased total business credit by$13,572 per firm in our sample, and we find that entrepreneurs on average were able to substitute for about 68% of this decline with personal credit, driven by mortgages. However, entrepreneurs with subprime credit scores, below-average income, and high credit utilization do not meaningfully substitute lost business credit with personal credit. Thus, we find that the personal financial characteristics of entrepreneurs play an economically important role in overall access to external finance for small businesses.

Bio: Jialan Wang is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Research Associate at the NBER. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in financial economics from MIT, and has previously held positions at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St Louis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Wharton School. Her research focuses on household finance, behavioral economics, and fintech. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Journal of Financial Economics.

Monday, February 10
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: We assess the long-term impact of the Great Recession on U.S. electoral outcomes. In line with prior work, we use a difference-in-differences approach, leveraging geographic variation in unemployment shocks. We find that counties more severely affected by the recession experienced a sustained increase in Democratic vote shares, particularly in Congressional elections, with effects persisting through 2022. Investigating potential mechanisms, we find that these electoral shifts are unlikely to be driven by (i) lasting negative economic repercussions, (ii) compositional changes in the affected regions, (iii) supply-side changes in candidate ideology, or (iv) compensatory government spending. Instead, survey evidence on individual attitudes suggests that the Great Recession significantly and persistently lowered expectations for future quality of life, potentially increasing demands for redistribution and benefiting Democrats. Contrary to prior work, our findings imply that (i) adverse economic shocks do not necessarily benefit right-wing populist candidates and (ii) recessions can have lasting political consequences even after their direct economic effects have subsided.

Bio: Dr. Hilbig graduated from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2022. and is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. His research lies at the intersection of Comparative Politics and Political Economy. He examines how economic transformations, such as labor market shifts, the transition to renewable energy, regional inequality, and housing crises, shape politics in established democracies. His work leverages a range of research designs and data sources, including natural experiments, large-scale surveys and administrative data. Previously, He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.

Monday, February 24
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Recent work argues that the American mass opinion space is organized not only by an overarching left-right dimension (e.g., liberal-conservative ideology, Democrat-Republican partisanship), but also an orthogonal anti-establishment dimension involving conspiratorial, populist, and Manichean thought. I apply this two-dimensional framework to the study of multiple U.S. elections between 2020 and 2024, examining the relationship between left-right and anti-establishment orientations over time and estimating the relative effect of these orientations on attitudes toward political candidates and various political issues. First, I find that, while distinct anti-establishment and left-right dimensions emerge across time, they increasingly depart from the orthogonality observed in 2020––by 2024 there is a moderate correlation. Second, I find that the relative magnitude of the association between each dimension and attitudes toward various issues and candidates changes over time. For example, prior to 2020, beliefs about the safety of vaccines were correlated only with anti-establishment orientations; by 2024, the correlation with left-right orientations was just as strong. Anti-establishment orientations also differentially distinguish presidential candidates over time.

Bio: Adam Enders is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville. He is also an instructor in the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the University of Michigan where he teaches advanced methodology courses on measurement and scaling techniques.

Monday, March 3
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, March 10
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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*Cohosted with Behavioral Science & Policy and Social Psychology

Abstract: In this presentation, I use data from the Big Three, the Personal Finance Index, and new information from the ECB’s Consumer Expectations Survey to document very low levels of financial literacy in the United States and around the world. Looking at the data from a personal finance approach, I show how financial literacy affects financial decision-making – from managing assets to debt and debt management – and the consequences of low financial knowledge for individuals and society as well. I discuss the implications of my findings for policy and programs, including the importance of teaching personal finance in high school and college and the new Initiative for Financial Decision-Making (IFDM) at Stanford University.

Bio: Annamaria Lusardi is Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and the Director of the Initiative for Financial Decision-Making, a collaboration between SIEPR, the Graduate School of Business (GSB), and the Economics Department at Stanford University. She is also Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the GSB. Previously, she was University Professor at The George Washington University and, before that, she was the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, where she started her academic career.

Monday, March 24
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, March 31
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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*Cohosted with Behavioral Science & Policy and Social Psychology

Abstract: The results of randomized trials testing promising interventions are often unstable. To understand why past successes do not necessarily predict future success, we focus on unassessed variability in four features of intervention implementation: fidelity, context, targeted participants, and implementers. Replication and continuous improvement require knowing what occurred, specifying fit with the intended intervention (implementation fidelity), and uncovering misfits (stumbling points). The hope is that by operationalizing a process theory into an activity set, interventions will yield theory-specified changes in trajectories toward desired outcomes. The reality is that process theories may apply only in specific contexts or populations and successful delivery of the intervention activity set may require that implementers have a particular set of beliefs or skills. Mismatches between the operationalization of a theory into an intervention and the contexts of implementation, the targeted participants, and implementers tasked with delivering the intervention can significantly affect implementation fidelity and hence failures to replicate. We concretize our discussion by focusing on a decade of delivery of the Pathways-to-Success program, a brief, manualized, universal social and behavioral intervention delivered by 8th-grade teachers during the school day with quality-of-implementation support. Pathways-to-Success supports student academic outcomes (GPA, grade retention). Controlling past academic trajectories, students in classrooms receiving Pathways-to-Success with higher implementation fidelity have better academic trajectories. We assess fidelity from observational coding using videotapes of each Pathways-to-Success 45-minute session and describe the associations between school contexts, features of participants and implementers, and fidelity across a decade of delivery in public schools in four states including about n=300 classrooms and n=6,000 children.

Bio: Dr. Oyserman’s research explores how subtle contextual changes can shift mindsets, influencing the perceived meaning of behaviors and situations, with significant downstream effects on outcomes such as health and academic performance. She conceptualizes these underlying processes through theoretical and experimental work, translating them into real-world interventions. A key focus is on cultural differences in affect, behavior, and cognition, as well as addressing racial, ethnic, and social class gaps in school achievement and health by revealing how seemingly “fixed” group differences often stem from malleable situational factors. Collaborating with an interdisciplinary team at the USC Dornsife Mind & Society Center, she publishes widely, with most of her work accessible online. Dr. Oyserman holds a PhD in psychology and social work from the University of Michigan, and previously served at The Hebrew University and the University of Michigan, earning honors such as the W. T. Grant Faculty Scholar Award and a Humboldt Scientific Contribution Prize, and recognition as a Fellow of several prestigious psychological associations.

Monday, April 7
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, April 14
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, April 21
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Wednesday, April 23
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, April 28
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: We estimate the labor and health effects of the menopause transition for U.S. women. Using data from the NLSYW and the SWAN and applying an event study methodology which exploits the individual-level variation in the time of menopause, we find that women undergoing this transition have a lower probability of employment of almost 20 percentage points, and a higher probability of working part-time if they remain employed. We do not find significant impacts on their monthly earnings or hourly wage. Regarding health, we find that menopause increases the probability of having osteoporosis and bone fractures but does not have a significant impact on the probability of being diagnosed with diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol. We also find that the probability of taking hormones to treat symptoms increases throughout the menopause transition, as expected. However, such increase in hormonal take-up is concentrated among white and highly educated women, which highlights the unequal access to treatment—and probably different menopause experiences—associated with traditional markers of socioeconomic status.

Bio:  Fernanda Marquez-Padilla is Assistant Professor of Economics at El Colegio de Mexico.  She is an applied microeconomist and her work mainly focuses on the intersection of development and health economics.  Her research explores the effects of policies on health, development, and wellbeing, and she has also worked on the socio-economic determinants of health.  In some of her other work she has also studied newborn health and determinants of birth outcomes, fertility, patient behaviour, and youth obesity.  Prior to joining El Colegio de Mexico, she was an assistant professor of economics at CIDE.  She received a PhD in Economics from Princeton University

Monday, May 5
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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*Cohosted with Economics

Thursday, February 6
9am – 1am US Pacific Time
VPD 203 and Zoom
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BIO: I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Barcelona and a researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB). As an applied microeconomist, my research focuses on family economics, health, and labor economics. A significant part of my work also incorporates genetic data into economic analysis.

We’re excited to announce that CIPHER 2025 will be held at USC’s Capital Campus in Washington, D.C. on February 26 – 28.

In its seventh year, the Current Innovations in Probability-based Household Internet Panel Research (CIPHER) Conference continues to be the leading event for discussion, exchange, and learning about probability panels. The event again will bring together researchers and policymakers from the United States and beyond for a wide-ranging conversation about innovations, challenges, and opportunities in this field.

Conference Registration and Fees

CIPHER is free to attend in-person or virtually, but registration is required. To register for CIPHER and/or the UAS Data Use Workshop, please complete this form.

Location and Format

The joint conference will take place February 26 – 28 at USC’s Capital Campus in Washington D.C.The preliminary program is as follows:

• February 26: UAS Data Use Workshop
• February 27: CIPHER and Reception
• February 28: CIPHER

Dates: March 8, 2025 (Saturday)

Venue: University of Southern California – Taper Hall (MPH)

UCLA and USC will host the 2025 Pacific Conference for Development Economics (PacDev)—the largest West Coast conference on Development Economics, and one of the leading Development Economics events in the United States. The conference brings together over 200 researchers from all over the world to present and discuss work that enhances our understanding of economic development, advances theoretical and empirical methods, and improves development interventions and policy.