Many households in developing countries lack formal financial histories, making it difficult for firms to extend credit, and for potential borrowers to receive it. However, many of these households have mobile phones, which generate rich data about behavior. This article shows that behavioral...

This paper proposes a methodology for identifying urban areas that combines subjective assessments with machine learning, and applies it to India, a country where several studies see the official urbanization rate as an under-estimate. For a representative sample of cities, towns and villages,...

To overcome the constraints for policy and practice posed by limited availability of data on crop rotation, this paper applies machine learning to freely available satellite imagery to identify the rotational practices of more than 7,000 villages in Ukraine. Rotation effects estimated based on...

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...

Country-level census data are typically collected once every 10 years. However, conflict, migration, urbanization, and natural disasters can cause rapid shifts in local population patterns. This study uses Sri Lankan data to demonstrate the feasibility of a bottom-up method that combines...

This paper presents different deep neural network architectures designed to forecast the distribution of returns on a portfolio of U.S. Treasury securities. A long short-term memory model and a convolutional neural network are tested as the main building blocks of each architecture. The models...

The goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and working toward a more equal distribution of income are prominent in international development and agreed upon in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 10. Using data from 164 countries comprising 97 percent of the world's...

This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. The analysis uses a novel measure of women's empowerment that is closely linked...

After the tragic factory collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013, the direct reforms and indirect responses of retailers have both plausibly affected workers in the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh. These reforms include a minimum wage increase, high profile but voluntary audits, and an increased...