Methods & Measurement

When should big data and algorithms be used to determine programme eligibility?

Although machine learning models using mobile phone data can make poverty targeting faster and more cost-effective, traditional survey-based methods remain more accurate. The optimal approach therefore depends on striking the right balance between co...

Emily Aiken Anik Ashraf Joshua Blumenstock Raymond Guiteras Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak Nicole Hu

Published

17.11.25

Intensification or expansion? A new approach to measuring agricultural change

Drawing on a randomised controlled trial among rice farmers in Nigeria, we introduce a new method for linking village-level interventions with high-resolution earth observation data – which captures spatial variation in how new technologies spread an...

Methods & Measurement

Jeffrey Bloem Clark Lundberg

Published

16.09.25

The ‘missing intercept’ problem with going from micro to macro

Many applied microeconomics papers conclude with a back-of-the-envelope calculation that scales their cross-sectional estimates to the aggregate level. These types of aggregate estimates are only valid under very strong assumptions due to the ‘missin...

Methods & Measurement

Benjamin Moll Oliver Hanney

Published

09.09.25

Variants of violence: How classifying conflicts helps us solve them

A core challenge in development economics is generalising country-specific findings across diverse contexts. Can a data-driven classification of conflict types help bridge the gap between deep case knowledge and broader comparative insight?

Methods & Measurement

Dominic Rohner Oliver Vanden Eynde Emma Verhille

Published

05.09.25

Understanding men’s true perspectives on gender-based violence in Mali

Combining direct questions with list experiments can help deduce men’s true perspectives on gender-based violence.

Methods & Measurement

Olivia Bertelli Thomas Calvo Emmanuelle Lavallée Marion Mercier Sandrine Mesplé-Somps

Published

17.07.25

Measuring poverty using mobile phone data: Implications for targeting and impact evaluation

In settings where reliable data on poverty is difficult to come by, non-traditional data sources such as mobile phone metadata has the potential to fill data gaps. New research on a cash transfer programme in Togo reveals that mobile phone data enabl...

Methods & Measurement

Emily Aiken Suzanne Bellue Joshua Blumenstock Dean Karlan Christopher Udry

Published

16.07.25