Calendrier du 24 janvier 2018
Development Economics Seminar
Du 24/01/2018 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
BLUMENSTOCK Joshua (Berkeley)
Towards Real-Time Measures of Poverty and Vulnerability
In wealthy nations, novel sources of data from the internet and social media are enabling new approaches to social science research and creating new opportunities for public policy. In developing countries, by contrast, fewer sources of such data exist, and researchers and policymakers often rely on data that are unreliable or out of date. Here, we develop a new approach for measuring the dynamic welfare of individuals remotely by analyzing their patterns of mobile phone use. To benchmark these methods, we conducted high-frequency panel surveys with 1,200 Afghan citizens, and with the respondent's consent, matched each individual's responses to his or her entire history of mobile phone-based communication, which we obtained from Afghanistan's largest mobile operator. We show that mobile phone data can be used to accurately estimate the social and economic welfare of respondents, and that machine learning models can be used to infer the onset and magnitude of positive and negative shocks. These results have the potential to inform current practices of policy monitoring and impact evaluation.
Economic History Seminar
Du 24/01/2018 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
SALEH Mohamed (LSE)
Socioeconomic Inequality across Religious Groups in the Middle East
This book project plans to study various questions related to the long-standing socioeconomic inequality across religious groups in the Middle East. It draws on novel primary data sources including medieval papyri, historical population censuses, and tax registers, in order to document the socioeconomic advantage of non-Muslim minorities in the region and how it evolved over time and varied across groups and territories. It then examines how inter-religion socioeconomic inequality was impacted by European influence and state-led development since 1800. Finally, it explores the historical roots of this inequality and the role of Islamic taxation in its emergence, and how the Islamic tax system itself evolved in response to it. Overall, the planned manuscript is part of a larger project that attempts to write a new evidence-based economic history of the region that draws on the digitization of various primary unexplored data sources at local and European archives and that combines the quantitative approaches of the social sciences with the large historical literature. In doing so, it builds on earlier work of pioneering economic historians of the region, while attempting to go beyond the conceptual and methodological divisions that separate economic historians from historians as well as those that separate nationalist from colonial narratives.