Experimenting with Development Economics

A Review of Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient: Evidence from Cash Transfer Programs World Wide

As I scrolled through Twitter a couple of months ago, I found a New York Times review of a recent economics paper that drew my interest. It caught my eye because the lead author is Abhijit Banerjee. Banerjee is all the co-author (with Esther Duflo) of what is probably my favorite economics book written for a general audience, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.

I was not necessarily interested in the subject matter of this particular paper (though it turned out to be a fun read), as much I wanted excuse to write about Banerjee's work. But it's a been a while since read Poor Economics (and the other books I reference), so this seemed like a reasonable entry point. 

Lessons from a Burning Bronx

What the New York City Fire Epidemic Can Teach Today's Analysts: A Review of the "The Fires"

In 1977, The New York Yankees faced off against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. Before one of the games, a fire broke out near the stadium. Audiences seem to remember the announcer,  Howard Cosell saying "There it is, ladies and gentleman, the Bronx is burning" as the Yankees lost and camera panned upwards to show the lingering smoke. This phrase captured the essence of the game, and more importantly epidemic of fires in the city. It even became the title of a ESPN television show about the World Series. Never-mind that the actual footage of the game doesn't include this phrase. 

Though the quote may be apocryphal, there truly was an epidemic of fires throughout New York City in the 1970s. I was turned onto a fascinating history of these fires, listening to What's The Point, a podcast from fivethirtyeight.  This podcast contained a conversation with Joe Flood, author of The Fires How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burn Down New York City-- and Determined the Future of Cities.

This history, in part, involves data, complex analyses, and the RAND Corporation. This of course, was fascinating to me, as I went graduate school at the Pardee RAND Graduate School (for all practical purposes, part of RAND), so I read Flood's book. Flood's story of the fires reminded me of some prescient lessons, that in some form are relevant to many analysts and data scientists to.

Stupid Data Tricks

A Markov-Chain Text Generator for Evanometrica

You will all have to excuse me, as it has been a little bit longer than I was expecting since my last post. First, I was traveling. Second, I found that it is a little more time intensive to generate high quality blog-posts than I initially assumed.

Being a data scientist and all, I figure I can just get the computer to do it for me! I decided to write an algorithm that can come up with headlines of blog-posts for me. It's an extremely simple Markov-Chain Model text generator, that leads to some entertaining results. This was fun, but accomplishes nothing of value, so it was a Stupid Data Trick.

Data Science, Econometrics and Climate Adaptation. OH MY!

A review of  Hsiang and Narita's  Adaptation to Cyclone Risk: Evidence From the Global Cross Section from 2012

This month, a world leaders and scientists are  engaging in a new round of climate talks in Paris. I personally believe climate change is one of the most important policy issue of the times, and hope you all have been following these talks in the news. When most people think about climate change, especially within the U.S. political context, they think about mitigation. Mitigation refers to efforts to curb carbon emissions and prevent further climate change. This is contentious for two reasons. First, some people like to claim that carbon emissions from humans are not the cause of climate change. Second, given our current technology it is legitimately expensive curb emissions, and in one way or another this will impose real costs on everybody in society. Of course, I agree with scientific consensus that human emissions are the cause of climate change. Most importantly, I have a great fear that the costs of not preventing climate change will be even more expensive in the long run than the costs of curbing them.

However, there is another part of the climate equation—one that is less controversial and sexy: adapting to climate change. Even if we stopped emitting all carbon today, warming would continue for decades.  Instead, we need to figure out ways to live with it. We can change our lives, our cities, and our resource planning to adjust for the uncertain future that comes with climate change. This is a topic that I could go on at length about. Wait, I did for nearly 200 pages in my PhD dissertation. I did some interesting (well, I guess the word "interesting" is debatable) research proposing planning approaches to adapt.

There is a whole other line of empirical research, examining the extent to which people already adapt to their climate. This research is suggestive of how some countries, states or cities may adapt in the future. To keep myself sharp on this topic, in this post I review paper estimating the extent to which countries have adapted to the threats of tropical cyclones (commonly known as hurricanes or typhoons). This is important for climate change, because all the evidence suggests that climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones. The paper is Hsiang and Narita's  Adaptation to Cyclone Risk: Evidence From the Global Cross Section from 2012. And its really freaking cool, even if you don't have a PhD studying climate change!

21-0 Status Check

A Quick Update on the Warriors 

I am getting far more milage out of my Warriors model than I ever expected, as they have made it to 21-0. If you are interested in reading how I do my analysis, check out my post on it here. But, almost two weeks and five wins laters, I just wanted to give you an update on how the Warriors' projections are doing.