The CSDE Training Committee is pleased to announce the 2018-2019 CSDE Fellows, Christine Leibbrand and Hilary Wething. Christine and Hilary have received the CSDE Fellowship funded by the Shanahan Endowment.
The CSDE Fellowship provides tuition, a stipend, health insurance and other benefits. Nineteen applications were submitted from the Departments of Anthropology, Epidemiology, Geography, Sociology, and Statistics, the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and the School of Social Work.
Christine is a fifth year graduate student and PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology, with a concentration in Social Statistics. She received an MA in Sociology in 2015 and the Demographic Methods Certificate in 2017. Her primary research areas are “Migration and Settlements” and “Wellbeing of Families and Households”. Christine’s dissertation addresses the overlooked question of how race/ethnicity and gender moderate the relationship between internal migration and changes in the social and economic conditions of individuals. She is conducting a multi-level analysis of changes in patterns of migration in the US, combining data from the two National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth with contextual data from several other sources. Christine is collaborating with her dissertation advisor and Fellowship mentor Stewart Tolnay, S. Frank Miyamoto Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and demographers at the University of Michigan and the Census Bureau on an innovative multigenerational study of the Great Migration in the 1940’s. This research will demonstrate whether the children of the Great Migration migrants experienced better life outcomes than the children of those who did not migrate, supporting what is believed to be a primary motivation in moving from the South to the North. Christine and her collaborators are examining the relationship between the contemporary social, economic and health well-being, neighborhood attainment, and migration patterns of adults, and the migration behavior of their parents during the period of the Great Migration. One paper from this project has recently been published in Demography. Christine conducts analyses of this novel confidential dataset that links individuals between the 1940 and 2000 U.S. Censuses, and the individuals to the Social Security Death Index, Social Security disability records, and Internal Revenue Service records at the Northwest Federal Statistical Research Data Center (NWFSRDC), a CSDE partner research center. During the fellowship, Christine will also continue to conduct innovative research on residential segregation and mobility in collaborations with Kyle Crowder, Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Sociology, and current CSDE Trainees and alumni.
Hilary is a fourth year graduate student and PhD Candidate in Public Policy and Management in the Evans School, with a concentration in Social Statistics. She received an MS in Public Policy and Management Autumn 2016. Hilary is working toward the completion of the Demographic Methods Certificate Program. Hilary’s primary research area is the “Wellbeing of Families and Households”. Prior to enrolling at UW, Hilary was a research assistant at the Economic Policy Institute (Washington, D.C.), where her work appeared in The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Hilary is a member of The Minimum Wage Study research team who are analyzing the impact of the minimum wage ordinance in Seattle. This research will provide insights for policy makers considering ordinances in other metropolitan regions and states. Hilary’s dissertation examines how labor regulations affect employment, specifically how local employment public policy may affect the earnings volatility of workers using a quasi-experimental research design. Hilary estimated the impact of Seattle’s Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance on the quarterly wages, hours worked, employment, earnings, job turnover, and earnings volatility of all affected workers in Seattle, relative to unaffected workers in Seattle and in other regions of Washington State. This program evaluation is vital to policy discourse because numerous localities and states are enacting paid sick leave laws without evidence of how these policies affect workers. Drawing on administrative data on unemployment insurance from the Washington State Unemployment Insurance program, obtained through an intra-state agreement between UW and the Washington State Employment Security Department, Hilary identifies the employment characteristics that are associated with earnings volatility, including wage rates, hours worked and job churning, and decomposes the volatility into within-job volatility and between-job volatility. This is critical for understanding worker welfare. Increased between-job volatility for individuals who are also increasing their earnings is indicative of improved welfare. However, increased within job volatility at a constant earnings level or increased volatility among people less likely to maintain employment would be welfare detracting to the worker. Hilary is also collaborating with her Dissertation Advisor and Fellowship Mentor, Heather Hill, and others on economic instability. In collaboration with CSDE Affiliate, Jennifer Romich, and others, they recently published the paper, “An Introduction to Household Economic Instability and Social Policy” in Social Service Review.
Congratulations to Christine and Hilary!
The Training Committee would also like to acknowledge the other outstanding fellowship applicants and the CSDE Affiliate mentors who have supported their students’ innovative research and access to unique data. We hope to be able to offer a greater number of fellowships in the future, because there were many worthy applications.