With all the recent attention focused on big data, it is easy to overlook that basic vital statistics remain difficult to obtain in most of the world. This project set out to test whether an openly available dataset (Twitter) could be transformed into a resource for urban planning and...

This paper studies the impacts of the large-scale Road Sector Development Program in Ethiopia between 1997 and 2016 on local economic activity and land cover (urbanization and cropland). It exploits spatial and temporal variation in road upgrades across Ethiopia, together with high-resolution...