CESR Events

The CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series will resume Monday, January 27, 2025 and conclude Monday, May 12, 2025.

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

Thursday, March 20
12pm – 1pm
RGL 100 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

Abstract: This paper investigates the costs to firms of providing various workplace amenities. Surveying hiring and human resources managers as representatives of their firms, we conducted a series of stated preference experiments to estimate the costs associated with offering different amenities such as telecommuting, schedule flexibility, paid time off, paid family leave, and shift work arrangements. Our findings reveal that providing these amenities entails significant costs to some firms, with considerable variation across firm.  The median firm in the sample considers offering telecommuting opportunities as a small cost while a subset of firms would not be willing to offer telecommuting opportunities unless they could correspondingly reduce wages by 52%.  We find that the median cost of permitting complete schedule flexibility to workers is especially costly to firms as is providing 12 weeks of paid family leave.  This study highlights the economic implications of workplace amenities for firms, offering a detailed analysis of the financial burdens involved in enhancing working conditions.

Bio: David Powell is a Senior Economist at RAND with research in labor economics, health economics, and econometrics.  His work explores the value of workplace amenities to employees, the impact of workplace injuries, and the key factors behind national shifts in labor force participation. Additionally, David investigates the causes and evolution of the opioid crisis, examining its broader effects on both the labor market and households. His methodological contributions include advancements in synthetic control estimation, quantile estimation, and difference-in-differences techniques.

Monday, March 24
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

Abstract: Work capacity is a measure of health expressed in relation to the functional demands of the work environment. Specifically, it is the capacity to perform a job or set of jobs, and represents the interaction between an individual’s cognitive, physical, psychomotor, and sensory abilities and the demands of the job. However, existing data do not allow direct comparisons between functional abilities and occupational requirements. The long-term goal of this research is to examine how functional abilities shape work capacity, interact with early-life human capital, and influence employment opportunities across local areas and industries, shaping independence and healthy aging.

Building on our previously published conceptual framework, this work-in-progress refines our work capacity measure by integrating self-reported abilities with objective performance tests, aligning them with occupational ability requirements from the O*NET database. To address potential self-report bias (e.g., overestimating one’s own abilities), we fielded a Fall 2024 survey among ~4,000 UAS respondents, collecting self-reported functional abilities alongside six cognitive performance tests. These tests allow us to construct two measures of bias, which will be incorporated into our individualized measures of work capacity.

This talk will present the proposed measurement approach and examine the extent of bias in self-reported abilities, discussing implications for assessing work capacity at older ages.

Bio: Italo Lopez Garcia is a Senior Economist/Research Scientist at USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR). A labor and development economist, he studies human capital development across life stages. He co-leads NICHD-funded RCTs in Kenya and Chile on early childhood interventions for disadvantaged children. His research also examines how older U.S. workers make health and labor decisions affecting cognitive health. In an NIA-funded study, he explores job demands and work capacity at older ages. He employs RCTs, quasi-experimental methods, and structural models.

Monday, March 31
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

*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.

Tuesday, April 1
1pm – 2pm
TCC 227 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

Abstract: Recent challenges in designing and implementing health technology are fundamentally sociotechnical, arising from the interplay between human, social, and technical factors. A persistent challenge in digital health is sustaining user engagement, as evidenced by high dropout rates in mobile health apps and low adherence to interventions. This talk explores the intersection of behavioral science and design for health, focusing on the role of preferences, choice, and optimization in digital interventions. Through examples from my research on weight management, alcohol reduction, and smoking cessation, I will illustrate how the field can leverage behavioral insights in conjunction with novel methodologies, such as data science techniques and personalization, to design better health technology. Maximizing the potential of health technology requires integrating behavioral science with a sociotechnical perspective to improve engagement and effectiveness. By doing so, we can develop more effective interventions that promote long-term engagement, behavior change, and health.

Bio: Michael Sobolev, PhD, is a behavioral scientist and technologist specializing in behavioral design and data science for health and wellness. He earned his PhD from the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 2017. Over the next five years, he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Computer and Information Science at Cornell Tech and Northwell Health in New York City. In 2022, he moved to Los Angeles to establish the Behavioral Design Unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he applies behavioral science to drive innovation in healthcare. During this time, he also served as a visiting scholar at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at USC. Beyond academia, Dr. Sobolev works with startups and nonprofits to design and implement consumer-facing products that improve health and well-being.

Monday, April 7
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

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
Add series to your calendar

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
Add series to your calendar

Abstract: We provide the first experimental evidence on how using more information about job applicants’ soft skills in firms’ hiring decisions affects both firm and workseeker outcomes. Partnering with the largest recruitment agency in South Africa, we randomize the criteria used to shortlist job applicants for job listings at partner firms. We test whether including measures of soft skills in candidate ranking leads to better firm-worker matches, more inclusive hiring, and improved labor market trajectories for workseekers.

Bio: Kate Orkin is an Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and an affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)(Development and Labour programmes), Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), the Institute of Labour Economics (IZA), and the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE).

Wednesday, April 23
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

Monday, April 28
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar

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
Add series to your calendar

*Cohosted with Economics

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