Susan N. Houseman, Senior Economist, W.E. Upjohn Institute
Where:
Tuesday, June 3, 2025 | 2:00-3:30pm ET
2:00-3:00 Seminar
3:00-3:30 Questions and Collaboration
Add to Calendar
When:
1430BD ISR-Thompson
426 Thompson St.
Join via Zoom:
Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 980 4179 9364
Passcode: 722639
Abstract
Many job attributes affect worker outcomes, yet measures of job quality tend to focus solely on compensation, reflecting the limited information collected in most surveys. The National Job Quality Survey—which was an outgrowth of the 2022 Job Quality Measurement Initiative, a collaboration of foundations and the U.S. Department of Labor—was designed to help fill this gap. The survey instrument was developed by a team of researchers and was first administered by Gallup in January and February 2025 to over 18,000 workers residing in the United States. The survey collected information on five dimensions of job quality: economic security, work conditions including scheduling and job design, work environment and culture, skills development and opportunities for advancement, and worker voice. The survey also collected detailed information on personal characteristics and outcomes and distinguished between workers in employee and various self-employment arrangements. The talk will cover features of the survey’s design and provide an overview of initial findings, including salient findings for special populations, such as those with certain diagnoses and conditions, and differences in job quality among employees, independent contractors, informal workers, and other self-employed workers.
Biography
Susan Houseman is a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Her recent research has focused on nonstandard employment arrangements (e.g., independent contractor, temporary help, and other contract company arrangements), job quality issues, the manufacturing sector, and measurement issues in economic statistics. Currently, she is leading a research team to develop and analyze data from a national job quality panel survey and is a co-organizer for the NBER Conference on Income and Wealth conference on the Changing Nature of Work. She chaired the Technical Advisory Committee to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2012 until the Committee’s termination in March. Houseman received the Society of Labor Economics Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurement in 2023 and was elected to be a 2025 Academic Fellow of the Labor and Employment Relations Association. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, Harvard University
When:
Tuesday, May 6, 2025 | 2:00-3:30pm ET
2:00-3:00 Seminar
3:00-3:30 Questions and Collaboration
Add to calendar
Where:
1430BD ISR-Thompson
426 Thompson St.
Join via Zoom:
Zoom link
Meeting ID: 935 4435 9971
Passcode: 521025
Abstract
This talk traces the concept of privacy from a late 19th-century legal right—spurred by tabloid harassment—to today’s digital age challenges. It highlights Differential Privacy (DP),a cryptography-based method designed to balance data privacy and utility in a quantified way. However, despite DP’s advancements and explicit warnings (e.g., Kifer and Machanavajjhala, 2011“No free lunch in data privacy”;Tschantz et al, 2022,“SoK:Differential privacy as a causal property”),misconceptions about its resistance to adversaries’ prior knowledge persist. By revisiting Warner’s (1965, JASA) randomized response mechanism, we argue that this misperception lies in treating data as static objects, rather than realizations of underlying, typically interdependent attributes or variables. We show how DP’s effectiveness can falter when adversaries exploit interdependencies among individuals—similar to how quarantining only symptomatic individuals fails to stop an airborne disease. A holistic statistical perspective on joint modeling data is therefore as crucial for data privacy as for data analysis. (Joint work with James Bailie and Ruobin Gong.)
Bio:
Dr. Xiao-Li Meng is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of HDSR and the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, is well known for his depth and breadth in research, his innovation and passion in pedagogy, his vision and effectiveness in administration, as well as for his engaging and entertaining style as a speaker and writer. Meng was named the best statistician under the age of 40 by COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) in 2001, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his more than 150 publications in at least a dozen theoretical and methodological areas, as well as in areas of pedagogy and professional development.
Courtney Kennedy, VP of Methods and Innovation Pew Research Center
When:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 2:00-3:30
2:00-3:00 Seminar
3:00-3:30 Questions and Collaboration
Where:
1430BD ISR-Thompson
426 Thompson St.
Join via Zoom:
Zoom link
Meeting ID: 968 0888 4937
Passcode: 177406
Abstract
Differential nonresponse is a major threat to public opinion polls. In the past, a person’s political outlook was not a particularly reliable predictor of whether they would participate in surveys. Now it is. Polling organizations are implementing numerous strategies to combat this challenge. This presentation covers the nonresponse challenge from the perspective of Pew Research Center, a national nonpartisan polling organization. The talk will present data on the scope of the challenge in Pew polling, which includes an address-based-recruited panel and an annual multimodal cross-sectional survey. It will also cover novel ways that Pew is trying to reduce nonresponse bias.
Bio
Courtney Kennedy is Vice President of Methods and Innovation at Pew Research Center. She supervises the Center’s survey design and data science teams. Her research focuses on nonresponse, weighting, modes of administration and sampling frames. Kennedy has a doctorate from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from the University of Maryland, both in survey methodology. She received bachelor’s degrees from the University of Michigan in statistics and political science.
Greg Duncan, Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine
When:
Thursday, April 24, 2025 at 12:00-1:30pm ET
12:00-1:00 Seminar
1:00-1:30 Questions and Collaboration
Where:
6050 ISR-Thompson
426 Thompson St.
Join via Zoom:
Zoom link
Meeting ID: 951 6246 6374
Meeting Passcode: 532540
Abstract:
Developmental differences between children growing up in poverty and their higher-income peers are frequently reported. However, the extent to which such differences are caused by differences in family income is unclear. To study the causal role of income on children’s development, the Baby’s First Years randomized control trial provided families with monthly unconditional cash transfers. One thousand racially and ethnically diverse mothers with incomes below the U.S. federal poverty line were recruited from postpartum wards in 2018-19, and randomized to receive either $333/month or $20/month for the first several years of their children’s lives. After the first four years of the intervention (n=891), and stellar field work by SRC, we find xxx impacts of the cash transfers on four preregistered primary outcomes (language, executive function, social-emotional problems, and high-frequency brain activity) and yyy impacts on three secondary outcomes (visual processing/spatial perception, pre-literacy, maternal reports of developmental diagnoses). At the seminar we will fill in the blanks!
Bio:
Greg Duncan is Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. He spent the first 25 years of his career at the University of Michigan working on and ultimately directing the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data collection project. Duncan’s recent work has focused on estimating the role of school-entry skills and behaviors on later school achievement and attainment and the effects of increasing income inequality on schools and children’s life chances. He is part of a team conducting the Baby’s First Years project – a random-assignment trial assessing impacts of income supplements on the cognitive and socioemotional development of infants born to poor mothers in four diverse U.S. communities. Duncan was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and has recently chaired two NAS consensus panels on child poverty.
Jade Marcus Jenkins, Associate Professor, School of Education- University of California, Irvine
When:
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 at 2:00-3:30pm ET
2:00-3:00 Seminar
3:00-3:30 Refreshments and Collaboration
Where:
1430BD ISR-Thompson
426 Thompson
Join via Zoom:
Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 962 0997 7741
Passcode: 235965
Abstract:
High-quality preschool programs are widely believed to be an effective policy tool to promote the development and life-long wellbeing of children from low-income families. Yet evaluations of recent preschool programs produce puzzling findings, including negative impacts, and divergent, weaker results than were shown in demonstration programs implemented in the 1960s and 70s. In this talk, I will present our team’s review of more recent, rigorous studies that supports more cautious conclusions regarding the long-term effectiveness of today’s preschool programs. I will then provide potential explanations for why modern evaluations of preschool programs have produced less positive and more mixed results, focusing on changes in a broad range of counterfactual conditions and preschool instructional practices. I will also address popular explanations such as subsequent low-quality schooling experiences that, we argue, do not appear to account for weakening program effectiveness. The field must take seriously the smaller positive, null, and negative impacts from modern programs and strive to understand why effects vary and how to boost program effectiveness through rigorous, longitudinal research.
Biography:
Jade Marcus Jenkins is an Associate Professor at the University of California Irvine School of Education studying early childhood policy. Her work is multidisciplinary, focusing on issues that are amenable to educational and social policy intervention, using diverse research methods to evaluate programs and understand the mechanisms that promote child and family wellbeing. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Florida in Family, Youth and Community Sciences, and Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After the M.S. program, Jade worked at a quasi-governmental nonprofit in Florida’s early childhood care and education system. This firsthand experience in policy implementation was her primary motivation to pursue a Ph.D. in public policy and specialize in early childhood development to learn how to evaluate and develop policies that provide support for families with young children and reduce poverty in the long-term.