Toward Real-Time Measures of Poverty and Vulnerability
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan asks the question, “Why should the financial services industry,... Read More →
Measuring Human Development with Remote Sensing and Machine Learning
In many developing country environments, it is difficult or impossible to obtain recent, reliable estimates of human development. Nationally representative household surveys,... Read More →
Migration and the value of social networks
What is the value of a social network? Prior work suggests two distinct mechanisms that have historically been difficult to differentiate: as... Read More →
Spectral Models of Security
The rapid proliferation of mobile phones and other digital devices can created an unparalleled opportunity to observe and understand the rapidly changing... Read More →
Predicting Poverty and Wealth with Mobile Phone Metadata
Accurate and timely estimates of population characteristics are a critical input to social and economic research and policy. In industrialized economies, novel... Read More →
How Do Labor Markets Equilibrate? Estimating the Effect of Local Labor Demand Shocks on Internal Migration and Local Wages
A central question in the study of migration concerns the role that migrants play in bringing an economy towards a more efficient use of its resources...
Measuring Migration with Large-Scale Behavioral Data
Understanding the causes and effects of internal migration is critical to the effective design and implementation of policies that promote human development.... Read More →
Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan
We examine the relationship between violence and financial decisions in Afghanistan. Using three separate data sources, we find that individuals experiencing violence... Read More →
A Society of “Silent Separation”: Migration and Ethnic Segregation in Estonia
Ethnic segregation is a striking feature of many contemporary societies. Yet, due in part to constraints of existing data, empirical efforts to... Read More →
Probabilistic Inference of Unknown Locations: Exploiting Collective Behavior when Individual Data is Scarce
New sources of large-scale geospatial data can inform policy decisions ranging from disease monitoring and city planning to disaster management and humanitarian... Read More →