All research in progress seminars are off-the-record. Any information about methodology and/or results are embargoed until publication.

Abstract:

How a government chooses to finance a health intervention has consequences in multiple domains. The choice of financing mechanisms can affect the uptake of health interventions and lead to widespread health gains. In addition to health gains, certain policies like public finance can insure against the need to make expenditures which would otherwise throw households into poverty. We present methods of extended cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA) for evaluating the consequences of health policies on health, impoverishment and equity which estimate health gains (deaths averted), financial risk protection afforded (cases of poverty averted), and distributional consequences of health policies. The ECEA approach incorporates financial risk protection and equity into the systematic evaluation of health policy. ECEA allows policymakers to determine the efficient purchase of both financial risk protection and equity in addition to health for a given benefits package, toward universal health coverage.

All research in progress seminars are off-the-record. Any information about methodology and/or results are embargoed until publication.

Co-authored with: Mark R. Cullen, Michael Baiocchi, Pooja Loftus, Victor Fuchs

Abstract:

Sex differences in mortality (SDIM) vary over time and place as a function of social and medical conditions. The magnitude of these variations, and their abruptness in response to large socioeconomic changes, suggest that biological differences alone cannot fully account for observed sex differences in survival. We document “stylized facts” about SDIM with which any theory will ultimately have to contend, drawing from a wide swath of available mortality data, including variation in probability of survival to age 70 by county in the United States, to Human Mortality Database data for 18 high-income countries since 1900, to mortality data within and between developing countries over the time periods for which reasonably reliable data are available. We show that, in each of the periods of economic development after the onset of demographic and epidemiologic transition, cross-sectional variation in SDIM exhibits a consistent pattern of female resilience to mortality under adversity. Moreover, as societies develop, M/F survival first declines and then increases, a “SDIM transition” embedded within the demographic and epidemiologic transitions.
 

Speaker Bio

I am a population scientist working on collecting, validating, and analyzing new and existing survey data. My research focuses on internet use in developing countries and making population estimates from sampled populations on- and off-line. Prior to joining Facebook I did graduate study in sociology at Chicago, Oxford, and the LSE. I did further work at the Harris School of Public Policy, the American Journal of Sociology, NORC, and the Center for TIme Use Research.

Interests

Demography, survey methodology, sociology, time diary data
 

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Speaker Bio

Michael Callen

Assistant Professor, Public Policy

Harvard Kennedy School

Michael Callen is assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His recent work uses experiments to identify ways to address accountability and service delivery failures in the public sector. He has published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the British Journal of Political Science. He is an Affiliate of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Jameel-Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the Center for Economic Research Pakistan (CERP), Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC), and a Principal Investigator on the Building Capacity for the Use of Research Evidence (BCURE): Data and evidence for smart policy design project. His primary interests are political economy, development economics, and experimental economics.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Is communication technology conducive to collective violence? Recent studies have provided conflicting answers to the same question. While some see the introduction of cellular communication as a contributing factor to civil conflict in Africa (Pierskalla and Hollenbach APSR 2013), others ascribe an opposite effect to mobile communications in Iraq (Shapiro and Weidmann IO forthcoming). During the talk, I will further explore the logic behind "Why the revolution will not be tweeted", and argue that the answer lies in contagion processes of collective action at the periphery, not the hierarchical schemes of central coordination as was argued before. To provide evidence, I will draw on historical accounts of social revolutions, a GIS study of the Syrian Civil War, a convenience survey sample from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, as well as network experiments of collective risk-taking in a controlled setting.

Speaker Bio

Navid Hassanpour

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Speaker Bio

Michael Bernstein

Michael Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction group and is a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. His research in human-computer interaction focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received Best Paper awards and nominations at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing (ACM UIST, ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, AAAI ISWSM). Michael has been recognized with the NSF CAREER award, as well as the George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from MIT, and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Abstract

Substantial systematic differences exist in children’s home learning experiences. The few existing parenting programs that have shown promise often are not widely accessible, either due to the demands they place on parents’ time and effort or cost. In this study, we evaluate the effects of READY4K!, a text messaging program for parents of preschoolers designed to help them support their children’s literacy development. The program targets the behavioral barriers to good parenting by breaking down the complexity of parenting into small steps that are easy-to-achieve and providing continuous support for an entire school year. We find that READY4K! positively affected the extent to which parents engaged in home literacy activities with their children by 0.22 to 0.34 standard deviations, as well as parental involvement at school by 0.13 to 0.19 standard deviations. Increases in parental activity at home and school translated into student learning gains in some areas of early literacy, ranging from approximately 0.21 to 0.34 standard deviations. The widespread use, low cost, and ease of scalability of text messaging make texting an attractive approach to supporting parenting practices.

Speaker Bio

Susanna Loeb

Susanna Loeb

Barnett Family Professor of Education, Stanford University

Faculty Director, Center for Education Policy Analysis

Co-Director, Policy Analysis for California Education

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

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Abstract: I seek to explain Pakistan’s persistent revisionism towards India even though it has bequeathed mostly failures, brought international opprobrium upon Pakistan, and has imperiled the viability of the state. I argue that the answer lies in the strategic culture of the army. Drawing upon six decades of the army’s publications, I derive the lineaments of the army’s strategic culture to understand how it views its threats and the best means to manage them. I find that the army relies upon non-state actors under a nuclear umbrella and a highly stylized form of Islam to create and sustain a civilizational conflict with India, almost always posited as “Hindu.” The army uses Islam to sustain domestic support for this conflict, buttress the morale of the troops, and to contextualize the Pakistan army within the historical landscape of Islamic war fighting. From the army's distorted view of history, the army is victorious as long as can resist India's purported hegemony and the territorial status quo. I conclude that Pakistan is an ideological or greedy state in the parlance of Charles Glaser, rather than a purely or mostly security-seeking state. The international community must develop policy instruments to contain the myriad threats posed by Pakistan.

About the Speaker: C. Christine Fair is an Assistant Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She previously served as a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation, a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, and a senior research associate at USIP’s Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention.  Her research focuses on political and military affairs in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka).  Her most recent book is Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (Oxford University Press). Additionally, she has as authored, co-authored and co-edited several books, including Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents (Oxford University Press, 2014); Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010); Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations in Sacred Spaces (Oxford University Press, 2008); The Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan (USIP, 2008), Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance (USIP, 2006); and The Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States (Globe Pequot, 2008), among others.  Dr. Fair is a frequent commentator in print (New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Review among others) as well on television and radio programs (CBS, BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, Voice of America, Fox, Reuters, BBC, NPR, among others).