A bold calculation: What would it cost to end extreme poverty worldwide?
Read the full article here Using detailed surveys and machine learning computation, new research co-authored at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action finds that eradicating extreme poverty would be surprisingly affordable. Joshua Blumenstock has spent much of his career... Read More →
Paper published in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
Abstract: We provide empirical evidence on how insecurity affects firm behavior by linking data on deadly terrorist attacks in Afghanistan to geolocated data on corporate mobile phone activity. We first develop an approach to estimate the geographic footprint of firms... Read More →
Vox covers lab’s work on “the end of poverty”
When it comes to fixing the world’s worst problems, it’s easy to pretend that we’re helpless. We tell ourselves that global poverty is just too big, too distant, and too intractable an issue for us to solve. If the world... Read More →
Lab wins data.org “Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge” — one of 9 winners (out of 1350 applicants)!
Our work, a partnership between GiveDirectly and CEGA, was one of 8 awardees (out of 1350 applicants) of the data.org Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge. Read the press release here: https://www.mastercardcenter.org/press-releases/dataorg-challenge-awardees-announcement. hm
NPR article on our work in Togo
Read about our work on NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/02/15/966848542/the-pandemic-pushed-this-farmer-into-deep-poverty-then-something-amazing-happene Shegun Adjadi Bakari, advisor to Togo’s president, consulted with Esther Duflo, who in 2019 won a Nobel prize for her experimental approach to alleviating poverty — using randomized control trials to see if programs... Read More →
Paper accepted at ICML
Our paper, “Balancing Competing Objectives for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning with Imperfect Data”, was accepted for oral presentation at the International Conference on Machine Learning (IMCL 2020). Full citation below: Rolf, E., Simchowitz, M., Dean, S., Liu, L., Bj{\”o}rkegren, D., Hardt,... Read More →