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, March 3
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Lifecourse epidemiology has long recognized the importance of intergenerational influences on health. However, the direction of these influences is typically described as flowing downward, from one generation to the next (e.g. from parent to child). A rapidly growing body of scholarship from economics, sociology, and public health has begun to consider the reverse – that is, whether the socio-economic status and resources of adult children flow ‘upward’ to influence the outcomes of their older parents. I will present both quasi-experimental and observational evidence on the impacts of adult child socio-economic status (e.g. educational attainment) on older parents’ health and wellbeing from across global settings. I will also touch on extensions of this work to other dimensions of social policy that might directly target young and middle-aged adults, with potential spillover effects on middle-aged and older parents.

Bio: Jackie Torres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at UC San Francisco. Her work examines the social determinants of health and health inequities, with a specific focus on the health of middle-aged and older adults. Her work triangulating evidence on socio-economic and psychosocial determinants of dementia risk with observational and quasi-experimental approaches is supported by an R01 and a recently awarded P01 by the National Institute on Aging. Dr. Torres received her PhD from UCLA, was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society scholar at UCSF and UC Berkeley, and was recently awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government to scientists and engineers in the early stages of their research careers.

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 17
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM; also Ecological Momentary Assessment) is a powerful tool for capturing fluctuations in behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. However, the frequent assessments in ESM studies are also associated with unique methodological challenges that can impact the validity of findings. Fortunately, the growing popularity of ESM has led to an acceleration in related methodological research in recent years. In this talk, I will present recent work and ongoing research projects that aim to improve the measurement of daily life experiences. First, I will discuss research on ESM data quality and quantity, including their assessment and impact on research outcomes. I will then explore the role of ESM study design in shaping data quality and quantity, and present work on optimizing sampling frequency, questionnaire length, and the use of incentives to boost participant engagement. Finally, I will zoom in on the topic of measurement in ESM studies and discuss current practices in questionnaire design and validation, associated challenges and resources, such as the ESM item repository.

Bio: Dr. Gudrun Eisele is a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Research Foundation Flanders in Belgium. She works at the Center for Contextual Psychiatry at KU Leuven. Her main research interests lie on the improvement of self-report data collection with a focus on ambulatory assessment.

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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Abstract: This paper extends Schuh (2018) by demonstrating that daily micro transactions in the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) contain reliable estimates of consumption and income that cover high percentages of U.S. data, forecast them well in real time, and match payday effects as well as pay cycle borrowing from other transactions data. Annual estimates of a benchmark PIH model of consumption using DCPC data match the literature well, rejecting the model due to excess sensitivity. Novel daily estimates of the MPC from expected income are qualitatively similar but an order of magnitude smaller, most likely due to the lower frequency of daily income. Relative to other transactions data, the DCPC is: 1) more representative; 2) publicly available; 3) continuous measurement; and 4) flexible real-time implementation.

Bio: Dr. Scott Schuh is an Associate Professor of Economics at West Virginia University, specializing in macroeconomics and monetary economics. Before joining WVU in 2018, he spent 26 years with the Federal Reserve, including as the founding Director of the Consumer Payments Research Center. He also served as a staff economist for President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and taught at Boston University, Boston College, and Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Schuh’s research focuses on macroeconomics, household finance, banking, payments, FinTech, productivity, housing, and more. He has co-authored two books and published over 40 scholarly articles.

Monday, April 14
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: This randomized experiment on a social media platform in Pakistan measures the impact of two treatments that use ex-ante moderation to control misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic compared to standard ex-post moderation. One treatment never posts misinformation, while the other rebuts it. We also disseminate official information about the pandemic on the platform. The treatments reduce daily users by 19%. This reduces exposure to official information by 29% more than exposure to misinformation. A conceptual framework posits that this can be explained by the fact that, in this setting, official information is more trusted and disseminated than misinformation.

Bio: Sarojini Hirshleifer is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Riverside and an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (UC Berkeley).  Her research spans the fields of development, labor and behavioral economics.  She focuses on understanding and alleviating constraints to higher productivity and better decision-making using field experiments and lab-based techniques.

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

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.