CESR Events

Spring 2026

CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series

Series resumes Monday, January 26, 2026

Seminar | The effects of cash transfers for low-income mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Greg Duncan | UC Irvine

Monday, May 4
12pm – 1pm PT
VPD 203 and Zoom

Abstract: This paper leverages data from the Baby’s First Years study – a randomized control trial that provided unconditional monthly cash transfers to low-income mothers with young children – to assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its disruptions and government responses, on children’s early home environments. It also assesses whether pandemic-driven family-process changes might have been responsible for the absence of treatment group differences in developmental assessments taken when study children were four years old. Our results suggest that the pandemic’s disruptions generated few and mostly short-lived detrimental impacts on most aspects of family functioning. Pandemic financial supports appeared to produce more persistent decreases in material hardship. Taken together, the collection of family process measures did not appear to have played an important role in the absence of treatment group differences in children’s age-4 developmental outcomes.

Bio: Greg Duncan is an American economist and Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of California, Irvine, as well as an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He spent more than two decades at the University of Michigan, where he worked on and ultimately directed the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data collection project, a landmark longitudinal study that since 1968 has gathered economic, demographic, health, behavioral, and attainment data from a representative sample of U.S. individuals and households. Using these and related data, his research has focused on economic mobility and the long-term effects of childhood poverty, particularly among low-income families, examining how early childhood conditions, family environments, peers, neighborhoods, and public policy shape children’s life chances. His work has highlighted both the harmful effects of economic deprivation and the benefits of income supports for working families. More recently, his research has explored the role of early academic skills, self-regulation, and health in shaping long-term success, and he is involved in a randomized trial studying the impact of income supplements on infant development. His contributions have earned him numerous honors, including the 2013 Jacobs Research Prize, as well as election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Seminar

Rosanna Smart | RAND

Tuesday, June 29
12pm – 1pm PT
VPD 203 and Zoom

Seminar | Intergenerational Effects of Genetic Risk for Dementia on Socio-Economic Outcomes

Silvia Barcellos | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, April 30
9am – 10am Pacific Time
Zoom (See email for Zoom link)

Abtract: Dementia is a prevalent and costly disease, but its effects on individuals and families’ economic outcomes are poorly understood. Existing papers have used the timing of disease diagnosis in an event study framework to estimate the effect of disease onset on work, income and wealth. One limitation of such approach is that dementia is difficult to diagnose and whether and when an individual gets diagnosed is endogenous. In this paper, we take a different route and focus on the genetic risk for dementia. Dementia has a strong genetic basis and we investigate how this genetic risk is related to early, mid, and late-life economic outcomes for individuals and their family members. To do that, we construct a novel data set that merges genetic and survey-based data from the Dutch Lifelines Biobank with dementia diagnosis records, longitudinal tax and health expenditure data from national-level administrative sources. We show that our constructed measure of genetic risk for dementia is predictive of dementia diagnosis from administrative data, but only after age 70, when dementia prevalence begins to increase sharply. Further, genetic risk for dementia is unrelated to socio-economic background in early and mid-life, contrary to what we find if we use dementia diagnosis. Preliminary results indicate that genetic risk for dementia has limited effects on the earnings, income and wealth of affected individuals, but that it has a substantial negative effect on the wealth of offspring. As parents age, offspring of parents in the top tercile of genetic risk see a reduction in wealth of 15% when compared to those with parents in the lower tercile of genetic risk.

Bio: Silvia Helena Barcellos is an Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences and Public Affairs. She is a health economist, and her work aims to understand the interplay between socio-economic status and health across the lifespan, with a focus on the role public policy plays on such relationships. She is currently the PI of an NIA R01 grant on gene-environment interactions in education, cognitive functioning, and dementiarisk. Professor Barcellos is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, Cambridge MA) and an International Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS, London UK).