Research

Working Papers

Data Availability and the Geography of Economic Research.

Abstract: How does data shape the geography of economic research? Beginning in 1984, USAID launched a series of Demographic and Health Surveys aimed at providing high quality, comparable data on health and fertility patterns in the developing world. I leverage the program's staggered introduction across countries in a generalized difference-in-differences framework, examining its effects on the geographic distribution of economic research and researchers. I present two sets of results. First, the DHS diversified location choice in research: its introduction is associated with a 7 percentage point increase in the likelihood that a country is the subject of a journal article in a given year, a 26% increase over the control mean. This effect is driven by development field journals and by articles in the top half of the citation-by-year distribution. Second, the DHS changes patterns of authorship: its introduction decreases the incidence of papers featuring local co-authors, and increases the incidence of rich country-only research teams. These results are consistent with a model in which data substitutes for local expertise in the research production process.

Works in Progress

Local Scientific Capacity and the Shape of Research: Evidence from Innovations for Poverty Action. [Analysis Ongoing].

Rich Country Bias and Demographic Research. [Analysis Ongoing].