191 research outputs found
Applications of econometrics and machine learning to development and international economics
In the first chapter, I explore whether features derived from high resolution satellite images of Sri Lanka are able to predict poverty or income at local areas. I extract from satellite imagery area specific indicators of economic well-being including the number of cars, type and extent of crops, length and type of roads, roof extent and roof type, building height and number of buildings. Estimated models are able to explain between 60 to 65 percent of the village-specific variation in poverty and average level of log income.
The second chapter investigates the effects of preferential trade programs such as the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on the direction of African countriesâ exports. While these programs intend to promote African exports, textbook models of trade suggest that such asymmetric tariff reductions could divert African exports from other destinations to the tariff reducing economy. I examine the import patterns of 177 countries and estimate the diversion effect using a triple-difference estimation strategy, which exploits time variation in the product and country coverage of AGOA. I find no evidence of systematic trade diversion within Africa, but do find evidence of diversion from other industrialized destinations, particularly for apparel products.
In the third chapter I apply three model selection methods â Lasso regularized regression, Bayesian Model Averaging, and Extreme Bound Analysis -- to candidate variables in a gravity models of trade. I use a panel dataset of of 198 countries covering the years 1970 to 2000, and find model selection methods suggest many fewer variables are robust that those suggested by the null hypothesis rejection methodology from ordinary least squares
Towards a human-centric data economy
Spurred by widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning, âdataâ is becoming
a key production factor, comparable in importance to capital, land, or labour in an increasingly
digital economy. In spite of an ever-growing demand for third-party data in the B2B
market, firms are generally reluctant to share their information. This is due to the unique characteristics
of âdataâ as an economic good (a freely replicable, non-depletable asset holding a highly
combinatorial and context-specific value), which moves digital companies to hoard and protect
their âvaluableâ data assets, and to integrate across the whole value chain seeking to monopolise
the provision of innovative services built upon them. As a result, most of those valuable assets
still remain unexploited in corporate silos nowadays.
This situation is shaping the so-called data economy around a number of champions, and it is
hampering the benefits of a global data exchange on a large scale. Some analysts have estimated
the potential value of the data economy in US$2.5 trillion globally by 2025. Not surprisingly, unlocking
the value of data has become a central policy of the European Union, which also estimated
the size of the data economy in 827C billion for the EU27 in the same period. Within the scope of
the European Data Strategy, the European Commission is also steering relevant initiatives aimed
to identify relevant cross-industry use cases involving different verticals, and to enable sovereign
data exchanges to realise them.
Among individuals, the massive collection and exploitation of personal data by digital firms
in exchange of services, often with little or no consent, has raised a general concern about privacy
and data protection. Apart from spurring recent legislative developments in this direction,
this concern has raised some voices warning against the unsustainability of the existing digital
economics (few digital champions, potential negative impact on employment, growing inequality),
some of which propose that people are paid for their data in a sort of worldwide data labour
market as a potential solution to this dilemma [114, 115, 155].
From a technical perspective, we are far from having the required technology and algorithms
that will enable such a human-centric data economy. Even its scope is still blurry, and the question
about the value of data, at least, controversial. Research works from different disciplines have
studied the data value chain, different approaches to the value of data, how to price data assets,
and novel data marketplace designs. At the same time, complex legal and ethical issues with
respect to the data economy have risen around privacy, data protection, and ethical AI practices. In this dissertation, we start by exploring the data value chain and how entities trade data assets
over the Internet. We carry out what is, to the best of our understanding, the most thorough survey
of commercial data marketplaces. In this work, we have catalogued and characterised ten different
business models, including those of personal information management systems, companies born
in the wake of recent data protection regulations and aiming at empowering end users to take
control of their data. We have also identified the challenges faced by different types of entities,
and what kind of solutions and technology they are using to provide their services.
Then we present a first of its kind measurement study that sheds light on the prices of data
in the market using a novel methodology. We study how ten commercial data marketplaces categorise
and classify data assets, and which categories of data command higher prices. We also
develop classifiers for comparing data products across different marketplaces, and we study the
characteristics of the most valuable data assets and the features that specific vendors use to set
the price of their data products. Based on this information and adding data products offered by
other 33 data providers, we develop a regression analysis for revealing features that correlate with
prices of data products. As a result, we also implement the basic building blocks of a novel data
pricing tool capable of providing a hint of the market price of a new data product using as inputs
just its metadata. This tool would provide more transparency on the prices of data products in
the market, which will help in pricing data assets and in avoiding the inherent price fluctuation of
nascent markets.
Next we turn to topics related to data marketplace design. Particularly, we study how buyers
can select and purchase suitable data for their tasks without requiring a priori access to such
data in order to make a purchase decision, and how marketplaces can distribute payoffs for a
data transaction combining data of different sources among the corresponding providers, be they
individuals or firms. The difficulty of both problems is further exacerbated in a human-centric
data economy where buyers have to choose among data of thousands of individuals, and where
marketplaces have to distribute payoffs to thousands of people contributing personal data to a
specific transaction.
Regarding the selection process, we compare different purchase strategies depending on the
level of information available to data buyers at the time of making decisions. A first methodological
contribution of our work is proposing a data evaluation stage prior to datasets being selected
and purchased by buyers in a marketplace. We show that buyers can significantly improve the
performance of the purchasing process just by being provided with a measurement of the performance
of their models when trained by the marketplace with individual eligible datasets. We
design purchase strategies that exploit such functionality and we call the resulting algorithm Try
Before You Buy, and our work demonstrates over synthetic and real datasets that it can lead to
near-optimal data purchasing with only O(N) instead of the exponential execution time - O(2N)
- needed to calculate the optimal purchase. With regards to the payoff distribution problem, we focus on computing the relative value
of spatio-temporal datasets combined in marketplaces for predicting transportation demand and
travel time in metropolitan areas. Using large datasets of taxi rides from Chicago, Porto and
New York we show that the value of data is different for each individual, and cannot be approximated
by its volume. Our results reveal that even more complex approaches based on the
âleave-one-outâ value, are inaccurate. Instead, more complex and acknowledged notions of value
from economics and game theory, such as the Shapley value, need to be employed if one wishes
to capture the complex effects of mixing different datasets on the accuracy of forecasting algorithms.
However, the Shapley value entails serious computational challenges. Its exact calculation
requires repetitively training and evaluating every combination of data sources and hence O(N!)
or O(2N) computational time, which is unfeasible for complex models or thousands of individuals.
Moreover, our work paves the way to new methods of measuring the value of spatio-temporal
data. We identify heuristics such as entropy or similarity to the average that show a significant
correlation with the Shapley value and therefore can be used to overcome the significant computational
challenges posed by Shapley approximation algorithms in this specific context.
We conclude with a number of open issues and propose further research directions that leverage
the contributions and findings of this dissertation. These include monitoring data transactions
to better measure data markets, and complementing market data with actual transaction prices
to build a more accurate data pricing tool. A human-centric data economy would also require
that the contributions of thousands of individuals to machine learning tasks are calculated daily.
For that to be feasible, we need to further optimise the efficiency of data purchasing and payoff
calculation processes in data marketplaces. In that direction, we also point to some alternatives
to repetitively training and evaluating a model to select data based on Try Before You Buy and
approximate the Shapley value. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential technologies that
help with building a federation of standardised data marketplaces.
The data economy will develop fast in the upcoming years, and researchers from different
disciplines will work together to unlock the value of data and make the most out of it. Maybe
the proposal of getting paid for our data and our contribution to the data economy finally flies,
or maybe it is other proposals such as the robot tax that are finally used to balance the power
between individuals and tech firms in the digital economy. Still, we hope our work sheds light on
the value of data, and contributes to making the price of data more transparent and, eventually, to
moving towards a human-centric data economy.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks InstitutePrograma de Doctorado en IngenierĂa TelemĂĄtica por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Georgios Smaragdakis.- Secretario: Ăngel Cuevas RumĂn.- Vocal: Pablo RodrĂguez RodrĂgue
Internal migration, remittances and household welfare: evidence from South Africa
Includes bibliographical references.In this thesis, I investigate the economic linkages between internal labour migration and the welfare of migrant-sending households and communities. The analysis is couched in the new economics of labour migration theory, which recognises the familial participation in migration decisions and therefore the potential role of economic linkages between migrants and their original households
The Pearson Commission, Aid Diplomacy and the Rise of the World Bank, 1966-1970
This thesis uses a focus on the Pearson Commission to explore some of the policy and institutional dynamics of international development aid during the later 1960s and early 1970s. It sets these explorations within a theoretical framework and an historical context. Firstly it draws on the theory of âinternational regimesâ created by international relations scholars. While acknowledging the importance of economic and military power balances, regime theorists also argue that the nature of international policy-making is partially defined by, âprinciples, rules, norms and processesâ which shape how policy-makers act. Using political science theory, the thesis identifies three groups who create and shape these regimes: elites, epistemic communities and bureaucrats.
Through a close focus on the dynamics at play within the Pearson Commissionâs creation, operation and reception, the main body of the thesis will identify how a small group of individuals, such as William Clark and Barbara Ward, acted to coordinate sections of these three groups within an âaid communityâ as the international aid regime changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is argued that specific changes within this regime, including the emergence of the World Bank as a technical leader on aid matters, the establishment of the 0.7 per cent aid volume target, and the creation of a definition of official development assistance (ODA), can be attributed to the workings of this community. This concept of a fractious and fragile aid community is used to challenge accounts of this period which emphasise the inexorability of the rise of the World Bank, or prioritise the importance of ideas and knowledge in explaining the changes in the aid regime
Inequality in the Developing World
Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the seventeen goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the worldâs largest developing countriesâBrazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. Each is a persistently high or newly high inequality context and, with the changing global inequality situation as context, country chapters investigate the main factors shaping their different inequality dynamics. Particular attention is on how broader societal inequalities arising outside of the labour market have intersected with the rapidly changing labour market milieus of the last few decades. Collectively these chapters provide a nuanced discussion of key distributive phenomena like the high concentration of income among the most affluent people, gender inequalities, and social mobility. Substantive tax and social benefit policies that each country implemented to mitigate these inequality dynamics are assessed in detail. The book takes lessons from these contexts back into the global analysis of inequality and social mobility and the policies needed to address inequality
Achieving the Circular Economy
Urbanisation and climate change are pushing cities to find novel pathways leading to a sustainable future. The urban context may be viewed as a new experimentation space to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Urban symbiosis and the circular economy are emerging concepts attracting more and more attention within the urban context. Moreover, new business models are emerging around sharing and peer-to-peer practices, which are challenging existing roles of actors in society. These developments are having an important impact on the flows of resources and the use of the city infrastructure, and each research area has taken a different perspective in the analysis of such impacts. This Special Issue aims to explore what a âcircular cityâ could constitute and how and why cities engage in circularity. This Special Issue includes seven high-quality papers on the theories and practices of circular cities. Actors, concepts, methods, tools, the barriers to and enablers of circular cities are discussed and a solid base and inspiration for the future development of circular cities are provided
Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing
The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies
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