Technology and Local State Capacity: Evidence from Ghana
This paper studies the role of technology in local-government tax collection capacity in the developing world.
Research
Let’s not abandon Russian scientists
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal, unprovoked war against Ukraine deserves all the opprobrium it has received around the world.
Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity
Public statistics on local economic activity, provided by the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Federal Reserve System (FRS), and state agen
Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing
We describe and apply three empirical approaches to identify superfluous police activity, unjustified racially disparate impacts, and limits to regulatory interventions.
Learning to be Fair: A Consequentialist Approach to Equitable Decision-Making
In the dominant paradigm for designing equitable machine learning systems, one works to ensure that model predictions satisfy various fairness criteria, such as parity in error rates across race, gend
The End of Cyber-Anarchy?: How to Build a New Digital Order Digital Disorder
Ransomware attacks, election interference, corporate espionage, threats to the electric grid: based on the drumbeat of current headlines, there seems to be little hope of bringing a measure of order t
America's Cyber-Reckoning: How to Fix a Failing Strategy
A decade ago, the conventional wisdom held that the world was on the cusp of a new era of cyberconflict in which catastrophic computer-based attacks would wreak havoc on the physical world.
Urban Mobility and the Experienced Isolation of Students and Adults
Do urban children live more segregated lives than urban adults? Using cellphone location data and following the ‘experienced isolation’ methodology of Athey et al.
RCTs to scale: Comprehensive evidence from two nudge units
Nudge interventions have quickly expanded from academic studies to larger implementation in so-called Nudge Units in governments.
The 2021 Digital Services Convening
In June 2021, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the digital transformation consultancy Public Digital hosted the fourth annual Digital Services Convening.
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