CESR Events Archive

The CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series will resume Monday, August 26, 2024 and conclude Monday, December 16, 2024.

Mondays
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, September 9, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract:  This presentation scrutinizes the transformative potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in survey research, focusing on three critical areas: questionnaire design, synthetic data creation, and the role of LLMs as qualitative interviewers. In the domain of questionnaire design, the lecture delves into if and how LLMs can construct contextually accurate and highly effective survey items. However, there are valid concerns about the model’s understanding and potential biases, which we will critically evaluate. She also discusses LLMs’ ability to fabricate synthetic data, preserving core statistical properties whilst ensuring privacy. Here too, the ethical implications and the potential for misuse of this capability pose challenges that need to be addressed. Lastly, the lecture explores how LLMs, with their human-like conversational ability, can act as qualitative interviewers, allowing in-depth information gathering at scale. Yet, questions about their ability to fully capture the complexity and subtleties of human interaction and response also remain. The underlying theme of this talk is the question on how research in this space should be structured.

Bio: Professor Frauke Kreuter holds the Chair of Statistics and Data Science at LMU Munich, Germany and at the University of Maryland, USA, she is Co-Director of the Social Data Science Center (SoDa) and faculty member in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM). Currently she serves as president for the American Association for Public Opinion Research.  In addition to her academic work, Professor Kreuter is Co-Founder of the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to accelerate data-driven research and policy around human beings and their interactions for program management, policy development, and scholarly purposes by enabling efficient, effective, and secure access to sensitive data about society and the economy.

Monday, September 16, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Bio: Ron D. Hays is a UCLA Distinguished Professor of Medicine and an affiliated adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation with a research focus on patient-reported outcomes. He has been a principal investigator for the AHRQ-funded Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) project at RAND since its beginning in 1995.  Hays has been acknowledged as one of the most highly cited and influential scientific minds by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics.  He has published 40 book chapters and about 690 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Monday, September 23, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: In many developing countries, married women face significant practical barriers to entering the workforce, particularly for jobs outside the home. These barriers include safety concerns, travel costs, and housework responsibilities. We design an experiment that lowers these barriers by establishing new local offices that are within a five-minute walk from home, exclusively for women, and permit children. We assigned 3,200 unemployed wives in Mumbai to the same jobs (part-time, smartphone-based digital work), either from home or a local office, and cross-randomized them to one of three monthly wage levels (ranging widely). About 27% of women take up local office jobs, suggesting that low-practical-barrier jobs can get more than a quarter of unemployed women to enter the workforce. However, shifting the job location to home is even more effective than local offices or higher wages. Specifically, 56% of women took up the same jobs when offered from home. In contrast, a five-fold increase in wages for local office jobs only increased uptake by 25%. A parallel experiment with husbands reveals that the higher take-up from home is gender-specific, as husbands were indifferent to job location for themselves. In a follow-up mechanism experiment, we find that women are unable to leave their homes even for a two-minute check-in at an office. This inability explains about half of the difference in job take-up between home-based and local office jobs. Gender norms are important in this context, implying that home-based and local jobs may be the most immediate path to increasing women’s participation.

Bio: Suhani Jalota is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In her research, Jalota uses field experiments to explore the intersection between women’s employment, health, and agency and the enabling role of technology. In her doctoral dissertation, she analyses constraints to women’s paid work and uses data from digital jobs performed at home in India to study the increase in female labor-force participation. For the last fourteen years, Jalota has been working in urban slum areas and rural communities on projects ranging from adolescent girl health, water, and sanitation to social protection policies in South Africa, Thailand, and several cities in India. She is also the founder of the Myna Mahila Foundation, a research-driven social enterprise with the mission to increase women’s agency and decision-making power to make them more confident, financially independent, and healthy. Founded in 2015, Myna Mahila now has a reach of 1.5 million women and a team of seventy in India. Jalota was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, where she received her PhD and MBA. She has a BS in economics and global health with the highest distinction from Duke University.

Monday, September 30, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Acts of hate have been used to silence, terrorize, and erase marginalized social groups throughout history. In this work, we investigate the motivations underlying extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice (EBEPs), proposing that acts of hate may often be best understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations. First, we provide support for the concomitant relationship between morality and hate in language from a diverse array of contexts, including the use of hateful language in propaganda to inspire genocide, slurs, and social media data. Next, we demonstrate that moral values oriented around group preservation are predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups and associated with the belief that EBEPs against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-based moral values and EBEPs against outgroups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong. In another line of work, we demonstrate that homogeneity in moral concerns results in increased levels of radical intentions. Overall, our research highlights the complex interplay of morality and hate, suggesting a potential avenue for intervention when hate is perceived as virtuous.

Bio: Morteza is a Professor of Psychology, Computer Science, and the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Morality and Language Lab. His work combines correlational studies of psychological processes in social discourse artifacts with behavioral experimentation. He studies the relationship between human values and environmental and psychological factors to predict real-world behaviors. Morteza is particularly interested in how extreme moral worldviews can lead to prejudice, violence, and hate. Morteza’s work has been recognized through several awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Young Investigator Fellowship from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Google Award for Inclusion Research. He received his BS and MS from UCLA and his PhD from Northwestern University.

Monday, October 7, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Racism is considered a fundamental cause of health inequities, but research on structural racism and health has been limited by lack of data. Helen Meier will discuss her work in historic and modern-day lending discrimination, one aspect of structural racism, including new data products and applications in population health research.

Bio: Helen C.S. Meier is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. She examines the socioenvironmental determinants of health and health inequities across the life course. Her overall goal is to understand how social vulnerabilities become biological vulnerabilities resulting in health inequities.

Monday, October 14, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, October 21, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: This paper concerns the potential uses of genetic data in economics, with a focus on estimating the interplay between genes (nature) and environments (nurture). We discuss — in the context of an empirical illustration of the moderating effect of school-starting age on one’s genetic predisposition towards educational attainment — how economists can benefit from incorporating genetic data into their analyses, even when they do not have a direct interest in estimating genetic effects. We argue that gene–environment (G x E) studies can be instrumental for (i) assessing treatment effect heterogeneity, (ii) testing theoretical predictions, and (iii) uncovering mechanisms, thereby improving understanding of how (policy) interventions affect population subgroups. Empirically, we find that being old-for-grade and having a higher genetic propensity for education benefits children on assessment tests as they progress through school, but more so for those with a lower genetic propensity for education.

Bio: Pietro obtained his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, and after that was UBS Foundation Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Zurich. He is currently a research affiliate at IZA, fRDB, HCEO, CHILD, CEPR, CESifo, and the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at UZH.His research focuses on the early origins and life cycle evolution of health and human capital. He is interested in Health Economics, Applied Econometrics, and Social Science Genetics.

Monday, October 28, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Flows of intergenerational support shift over the life course, with children requiring support from parents when young and (in many contexts) expected to provide for parents as they age. During the intermediate stages of the family life course, as children are gradually transitioning to adulthood and parents are aging, patterns of exchange are complex. It is important to understand the extent and nature of these exchanges, especially in low-income settings with weak social safety nets where people at all ages depend on family for support. This paper analyzes exchanges of financial, material, instrumental, and emotional support between mid-life women and their adolescent and young adult children in a low-income, high-fertility context. We draw on newly available survey data from a longitudinal study of women in rural southern Mozambique. Results show complex and varied patterns of exchange across different domains. Mothers both provide and receive support, with the balance of support varying across domains and conditioned by both maternal and child characteristics. We discuss these results in the context of changing expectations for the transition to adulthood in this setting.

Bio: Sarah Hayford is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. She studies childbearing, family formation, and reproductive health, primarily in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. She is interested in how people make plans about these behaviors and who is able to carry out their plans. Recent and current research topics include the determinants of fertility intentions and desires in the United States, policy impacts on reproductive health access and outcomes in Ohio, the transition to adulthood in low- and middle-income countries, and how reproductive trajectories shape women’s long-term health and well-being in rural Mozambique. Hayford’s research has been funded by NICHD, NIA, and private foundations.

Thursday, September 5, 2024
9am – 10am
Zoom
CESR email will be sent with Zoom info

Thursday, October 3

9am – 10am US PT (6pm Eurpopean Central Time)
Zoom link emailed to guests

Bio: Nicolau Martin-Bassols is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna. He obtained his PhD from Monash University’s Centre of Health Economics in 2022. He specializes in applied microeconomics and micro-econometrics, with a focus on health, labor economics, and social genomics. His research explores the impact of genetics, familial investments, and policy interventions on the construction of health and human capital, as well as economic disparities.

CESR and USC is hosting AASRO 2024!

Dates: September 25-27, 2024 (Tuesday – Thursday)

Venue: University of Southern California, MCB101

Dates: January 10-12, 2025 (Fri-Sun)

Venue: University of Southern California

Duration: 3 days (6 half-day sessions, 9-12, 1-5)

Format: Invited talks, panel discussions, and social gathering

Registration: Will open soon. Join the mailing list to get more information.

Organizing committee: Anna Krylov (USC), Arie Kapteyn (USC, CESR), Margaret Crable (USC Dornsife, Communication), Michele Warnock (USC, CESR), Lee Jussim (Rutgers), Ivan Marinovic (Stanford)

Advisory board: Alexander Arnold (Heterodox Academy), Cory Clark (UPenn), Barry Honig (Columbia, AASL), Luana Maroja (Williams), Sean Stevens (FIRE), Abigail Thompson (UC Davis, AFA), Keith Whittington (Yale, AFA)