CESR Seminar and Brown Bag Series

CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series 2024

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
Add series to your calendar

Seminar | Leveraging AI for Survey Research

Frauke Kreuter | University of Maryland

Monday, September 9, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

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.

Seminar | A researcher’s perspective on the use of patient-reported experience and outcome measures in ambulatory healthcare

Ron Hays | University of California, Los Angeles

Monday, September 16, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

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.

Seminar | What Works For Her? How Jobs from Home and Local Offices Affect Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India

Suhani Jalota | Stanford University

Monday, September 23, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

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.

Seminar | The Moral Landscape of Hate

Morteza Dehghani | USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Monday, September 30, 2024

12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

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.

Social-Science Genetics Seminars

Seminar | The Economic Impact of Heritable Physical Traits: Hot Parents, Rich Kid? (with Anwen Zhang)

Daniel S. Hamermesh | University of Texas at Austin

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

 

SEMINAR | EXAMINING THE HEALTH LEGACY OF THE NHS: SHORT-AND LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON INFANT MORTALITY AND ADULT HEALTH OUTCOMES

Nicolau Martin-Bassols | University of Bologna

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.

Conferences

AASRO 2024 at USC

We are hosting AASRO at USC in Los Angeles, Wednesday September 24-Friday September 27, 2024