Satellite and ML-based approaches for measuring and understanding livelihoods
Presented by Professor Marshall Burke (Stanford University)
In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We review recent efforts to combine satellites and other sources of novel data to improve measurements of key livelihood outcomes in the developing world.
We then show, in the context of an impact evaluation of an expansion of the electrical grid across Uganda, how these novel approaches need to be tailored to the downstream task of interest. The task of predicting livelihoods is not separable from the task of inferring the impact of an intervention on these livelihoods. We then show how ML-based inference techniques deliver more reliable estimates of the causal impact of electrification than traditional alternatives when applied to these data.
We estimate that grid access improves village-level asset wealth in rural Uganda by 0.17 standard deviations, more than doubling the growth rate over our study period relative to untreated areas. Our results provide country-scale evidence on the impact of a key infrastructure investment, and provide a low-cost, generalizable approach to future policy evaluation in data sparse environments.
Speaker
Marshall Burke is associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science and Deputy Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on measuring and understanding economic livelihoods across the developing world. His work regularly appears in both economics and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Lancet.
SoDa Labs webinar series
The SoDa Labs webinar series provides a platform for researchers around the world to present work that uses novel and alternative data and/or tools from data science and beyond to answer social science questions.
Event Details
- Date:
- 14 September 2021 at 10:00 am – 11:00 am
- Venue:
- Online
- Categories:
- General; SoDa Labs; SoDa Labs Webinars
Description
Presented by Professor Marshall Burke (Stanford University)
In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We review recent efforts to combine satellites and other sources of novel data to improve measurements of key livelihood outcomes in the developing world.
We then show, in the context of an impact evaluation of an expansion of the electrical grid across Uganda, how these novel approaches need to be tailored to the downstream task of interest. The task of predicting livelihoods is not separable from the task of inferring the impact of an intervention on these livelihoods. We then show how ML-based inference techniques deliver more reliable estimates of the causal impact of electrification than traditional alternatives when applied to these data.
We estimate that grid access improves village-level asset wealth in rural Uganda by 0.17 standard deviations, more than doubling the growth rate over our study period relative to untreated areas. Our results provide country-scale evidence on the impact of a key infrastructure investment, and provide a low-cost, generalizable approach to future policy evaluation in data sparse environments.
Speaker
Marshall Burke is associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science and Deputy Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on measuring and understanding economic livelihoods across the developing world. His work regularly appears in both economics and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Lancet.
SoDa Labs webinar series
The SoDa Labs webinar series provides a platform for researchers around the world to present work that uses novel and alternative data and/or tools from data science and beyond to answer social science questions.
Event Contact
- Name
- SoDaLabs@monash.edu
- Phone
- Organisation