Join us in congratulating Brad Foster, former CSDE Fellow, on starting as a research statistician at the US Census Bureau with the Center for Administrative Records Research Applications (CARRA)! CSDE wishes Brad the very best in his new position.
This past November, Brad successfully defended his dissertation: “Rooted or Stuck? The Causes and Consequences of American Mobility Decline.” Read on to learn more about Dr. Foster and his research.
This workshop offers an introduction to the statistical programming language Stata and meets two consecutive Tuesdays (Jan 24 and Jan 31) from 4 PM to 6 PM PT. It assumes no prior experience with Stata, but it does assume familiarity with basic statistical concepts. Signup for the workshop using the following link:
Falling Behind: The Black-White Wealth Gap in Life Course Perspective
The black-white wealth gap in the United States is vast and increases with age. To better understand this disparity, we adopt a life course perspective, examining the accumulation of wealth across individuals’ lives and how wealth accumulation changes with age. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we show that whites accumulate wealth more rapidly than blacks throughout their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and the gap grows dramatically in the 30s. Unlike whites, whose annual wealth accumulation grows over the life course, blacks’ annual wealth accumulation remains low throughout early and middle adulthood. Individual traits, especially income and education, explain about 2/3 of the race gap in total wealth accumulation between ages 20 and 50. When we account for the tighter income-accumulation association as individuals age, the role of income differences increases still more. Net of individual traits, black-white differences in social origins explain only 2 percent of the race gap in wealth accumulated between ages 20 and 50. Blacks are cumulatively disadvantaged in wealth accumulation across the life course in two ways: (1) because their median annual wealth accumulation is always lower than whites’, with each year they fall farther behind in amassed wealth; (2) because the black-white accumulation gap grows with age, blacks lose ground at an increasing rate each year.
Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald is Professor of Sociology, as well as a faculty member in the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2011. Prior to her appointment at Harvard she was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. Her research takes a demographic approach to the study of social stratification.
To schedule a meeting with Dr. Killewald, click here.
The International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office of the U.S. Department of Education is pleased to announce the the opening of the competition for the Fiscal Year 2017 Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) program.
The GPA program provides grants to institutions that organize programs for K-12 teachers, college students, and faculty to engage in short-term and long-term overseas projects focused on training, research, and curriculum development in modern foreign languages and area studies. Short-term projects include seminars, curriculum development, and group research or study. Long-term projects support advanced intensive overseas programs that focus on languages, the humanities, or social sciences.
IFLE expects to make 20 new awards totaling $2.7 million under the FY 2017 GPA competition. The application is now available at www.grants.gov. The deadline to submit an application is March 7, 2017.
The Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario invites applications for a postdoctoral scholar in Sociology and Demography as part of the SSHRC and CIHR funded project CREW. The main focus will be on the population of older adults without close kin, and how the welfare state shapes their well-being. The main datasets for this project will be SHARE, the Canadian General Social Survey, and the GGS (Generations and Gender Surveys). We will also use microsimulation to examine how the population of older adults without (close) kin may change in the future. The initial duration for this position is one year, with the possibility of extension of up to 1.5 additional years. The position will be supervised by Dr. Rachel Margolis.
The theme group Families and Generations at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute has a vacancy for one PhD position to study the determinants of health and well-being at older ages. The focus will be on the mechanisms through which life events (e.g., retirement and caregiving) affect health and well-being and how welfare policies shape these mechanisms and outcomes. The main datasets for this project will be the GGS (Generations and Gender Surveys) and SHARE (Survey of Heath and Retirement in Europe). The position will be supervised by Prof. Anne Gauthier (NIDI-RUG) and Prof. Nardi Steverink (RUG) and will be based at NIDI in the Hague. This is a paid position for an initial duration of one year, with the possibility of an additional two years.
The UW Center for Social Science Computation and Research has opened registration for its free series of Winter Quarter courses. These classes introduce students to various statistical programming languages and prepare them for the deeper topics scheduled for later weeks. More information is available below.
Fellowships are available through the Substance Abuse Epidemiology Training Program (SAETP) at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, 722 West 168th St, New York, NY.
Getting your data in shape to do the statistical analysis is typically 90% of the time and effort of data analysis. CSDE 502 is a course designed to fill the curriculum gap between methods courses that emphasize study design and statistics courses that teach statistical analysis. It focuses on applied methods for data preparation and will introduce the following topics using Stata and R: data management and documentation, data cleaning and variable creation, sampling and complex survey design, and reproducibility. CSDE 502 (Population Proseminar) is a 2-credit course offered Winter Quarter 2017. It meets Fridays from 10:30am to 12:20pm and is open to all interested graduate students.
For more details, please see the 2017 Winter CSDE 502 Syllabus
Questions? Contact Cori Mar.