Overview
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at UCLA and Co-Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR). Her research focuses on social stratification and inequality, higher education effects, and causal inference methods — particularly heterogeneous treatment effects and propensity-based approaches to studying how effects vary across the population. She is best known for documenting negative selection in the returns to college education: individuals least likely to attend college (low propensity) benefit most from doing so.
Key Contributions / Features
- Causal effect heterogeneity (Brand and Simon-Thomas 2012): Methodological review chapter covering propensity-based heterogeneity analysis, ATE/ATT/LATE/MTE distinctions, and negative vs. positive selection. Demonstrates methods using college attendance and civic participation. See Heterogeneous Treatment Effects.
- Negative selection in college returns (Brand and Xie 2010): Co-authored American Sociological Review paper showing that individuals least likely to attend college experience the largest earnings gains from doing so — evidence for negative, not positive, selection in treatment effects. Won ASA James Coleman Award (2012) and ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Distinguished Article Award (2011).
- Heterogeneous college effects on fertility (Brand and Davis 2011): Co-authored Demography paper extending the Brand-Xie framework to fertility outcomes, finding negative selection — women least likely to attend college experience the largest fertility-decreasing effects of doing so.
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