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, January 27
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: This paper examines the adoption and diffusion of a computer-assisted learning (CAL) platform. Using a large-scale randomized control trial involving over 1,600 teachers and 50,000 students in 188 low-performing public schools in Lima, Peru, we evaluated three treatments: (i) school-wide workshops, (ii) workshops for selected teachers, and (iii) workshops plus personalized coaching for selected teachers. Treated teachers and their students showed significantly greater engagement with the platform compared to non-treated teachers; teachers who received both workshops and coaching had significantly more students connecting regularly and completing exercises than those who only received workshops. At endline, treated teachers reported having more information, more knowledge, and more favorable attitudes about technology. Treatment effects were heterogeneous by gender, age, digital skills, and attitudes towards technology. In schools where only selected teachers were treated, we also find positive spillovers among non-treated teachers. Platform use declined markedly in subsequent years, but supplementary workshops were significantly more effective at boosting utilization for teachers who had received our interventions. We conclude that scalable low-cost training programs can significantly improve the adoption of technology by teachers.

Bio: Ofer Malamud is Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Malamud is an economist focused on education policy from an international perspective. His research is concentrated in three substantive areas: educational investments over the life course, the role of technology in the formation of human capital, and the effect of general and specific education on labor market outcomes. He has studied these topics in a wide range of institutional settings across countries such as Chile, England, Israel, Mexico, Peru, Romania, Scotland, and the United States.

Malamud is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the CESifo Research Network. He also serves as a research consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Before joining Northwestern, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Monday, February 3
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Tuesday, February 4
12pm – 1pm
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 economist specializing in household finance and the intersection of labor economics and finance. Wang holds a Ph.D. in financial economics from MIT. She is an assistant professor of finance at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Geis College of Business.

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

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

Venue: University of Southern California – SGM 124 and MCB

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

Format: Invited talks, panel discussions, and social gathering

Registration: Register here.

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)

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.