I am an applied economist focusing on program evaluations in two areas: urban economics issues and customs, trade facilitation and governance. My projects also involve work on combining new and existing data sources to answer policy questions and analyze customs and border crossing, cities, and networks of trade and transport. I rely combination of administrative, survey, and webscrapped data, satellite imagery and mobile phone records.

Urban economics

• The Impact of Roads on Land-Use Change in Ethiopia: Evidence from Satellite Data, World Bank Policy Research Paper, #1000, 2022. with S. Alder, K. Croke, R. Marty, A. Vaisey.
  • This project studies the impact of the 20 years Road Sector Development project on land use in Ethiopia. The team uses satellite imagery to look into changes in cropland and urbanization following the opening of the newly built or rehabilitated roads. Given the large number of roads built or rehabilitated, we are able to provide estimates for different road types.
• Impact Evaluation of Transport Corridors: Approach from the ieConnect Portfolio, Mobility and Development, Spring 2023,- With A. Arun.
  • Transport infrastructure has the potential to bolster economic development by connecting several pillars of a nation’s economy. Several studies have independently
  • documented the gains and losses from investments in transport infrastructure, such as direct and indirect outcomes, wider economic benefits, and complementary measures. This article presents a programmatic approach for evaluating the impact of transport infrastructure investments with respect to their short and long run goals. It builds on existing data and reviews newly available high-frequency geospatial data and innovations on outcome measurements.
• Informal Transit Networks in Emerging Cities (work in progress) – with D. Björkegren, .Nagpal, and N. Tsivanidis
  • In this project, we are studying two questions related to public transit: does the introduction of a public option crowd out the private sector, and what are the distributional impacts ofnew system across commuters and informal incumbents? What are the optimal regulations for the network of public and paratransit in this context? We use the Lagos Bus Reform Intervention to study the two questions based on a large scale data collection on paratransit frequencies and fares, e-ticketing data and  cell phone home registry.  
• Impact of road construction on lagging regions: Evidence from Pakistan (work in progress) – with Marta Santamaria, Cong Peng and Rob Marty
  • In this ongoing impact evaluation, we study the impacts of transport investments on economic activity in Pakistan

Trade and customs

• Customs Data for Measuring Administrative Performance, in The Government Analytics Handbook Book, D. Rogger and C. Schuster eds, chapter 14, World Bank Group, 2023
  • This chapter showcases how customs administration can use their data to more effectively mange performance., deriving indicators for trade facilitation (e.g. costs of the process, in particular time delays); revenue collection (e.g. trade volume and revenue collected based on the assessed value); and safety (e.g. number of goods in infraction seized). It describes how traditional surveys and high frequency data from GPS and administrative sources could be used to improve the clearance and revenue collection process.
• Combatting Customs Fraud: Evidence from Madagascar, World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper, #9254, 2020 – with C. Chalendard, A. M. Fernandes, A. Mattoo, G. Raballand, B. Rijkers
  • This paper examines how the provision of information to customs inspectors and their monitoring impact tax revenue collection and fraud detection, conducting two separate but highly complementary analyses. First, we examine the returns to the third-party provision of information, in the form of valuation advice for a subset of high-risk import declarations. Second, we document the results of a nationwide risk management randomized control trial to increase revenue collection by increasing information provision and monitoring of customs inspectors’ actions.
• Customs process simplification and trade: evidence from Malawi (work in progress)
  • In this project, the team is studying two trade facilitation reforms in Malawi: the streamlining of the procedures at the border and the connection of several agencies to the ASYCUDA database, and the change in declaration filed for goods for warehousing.  The trade facilitation interventions are anticipated to augment revenue collection by the Malawi customs authorities, reduce clearance time for goods at the borders, decrease trade related costs, and increase trade volumes. The data system supporting the evaluation is low cost and based on making better use of existing customs data.

Big data for policy evaluation

• Global poverty estimation using private and public sector big data sources, Nature: Sci Rep, 14, 3160, 2024 – with R. Marty
  • Household surveys give a precise estimate of poverty; however, surveys are costly and are fielded infrequently. We demonstrate the importance of jointly using multiple public and private sector data sources to improve predictions of levels and but also changes in wealth for a large set of countries. We train models using 63,854 survey cluster locations across 59 countries, relying on data from satellites, Facebook Marketing information, and OpenStreetMaps. The model generalize previous studies to a wide set of countries and explains 61% of the variation in levels of wealth at the survey cluster level and 68% of the variation at the district level, and the model explains 5% and 10% of the variation of changes in wealth at the cluster and district levels. Models perform best in lower income countries and in countries with higher variance in levels and changes in wealth. Features from OpenStreetMaps, nighttime lights, and land cover data are most important in explaining levels of wealth, and features from nighttime lights are most important in explaining changes in wealth
• The Spanish research network in the 2008 budget crisis (Abandoned)
  • In this paper, I look at the impact of inter-university research partnerships on the production of research outputs. Using an originally built set of scientific publications, I analyze the network of research in Spain based on the network of Spanish coauthors. I show how the growth in research productivity of Spanish institutions before the crisis was linked to the increase in universities’ budgets and in interuniversity collaborations.