Empirical work at the intersection of climate science, political economy, development, and public health.
All papers combine large-scale panel datasets, causal inference methods, and policy-relevant empirical designs.
20-country monthly panel integrating ERA5 climate reanalysis, SPEI drought indices, MLEED, ACLED, and FAO food-price series. Applies ElasticNet regularization and a mediation framework to decompose climate-to-conflict pathways. With Erik Wibbels (UPenn).
Contributed to a project scraping and processing over 120 million news articles from local outlets across 60+ developing countries to generate high-frequency event data on political and environmental dynamics. Contribution focused on web scraping and count verification to ensure data integrity. With Erik Wibbels (UPenn).
Examines how El Niño and La Niña cycles affect agricultural productivity and food prices across the Dry Corridor, and how resulting climate shocks and environmentally motivated violence shape migration flows toward the U.S. border. Contribution: descriptive figures on temporal and geographic variation in environmental events. With Erik Wibbels, Irina Marinov, Anna Cabre & Jeremy Springman (UPenn).
Assisted with data collection and validation for a study on replication practices and open science norms, including coding replication file policies across 175 journals and helping validate the analysis code. With Guy Grossman (UPenn) and collaborators.
View on SocArXiv ↗Cluster-randomized evaluation across 150 school-community dyads (2,160 girls, 1,187 caregivers). Conducted high-frequency data quality checks (HFCs) for baseline and endline surveys; monitored safeguarding trigger variables ensuring 26 sensitive disclosures were escalated under the differentiated referral protocol; identified instrument assignment errors across 8 schools corrected prior to endline. With Guy Grossman (UPenn) & IPA/WHI.
A guide to the primary data infrastructure underlying my research projects.
A UPenn DevLab project that scrapes and processes news from 120M+ articles across 60+ developing countries using NLP pipelines to generate high-frequency, structured event data on political violence, protest, and environmental dynamics — filling gaps left by Western-centric data sources.
The structured output of the MLP pipeline — a high-frequency political event dataset coded from local-language news, covering protest, violence, and governance events across the Global South at sub-national resolution.
A globally recognized real-time dataset tracking political violence and protest events worldwide, coded from media reports and local sources. Provides precise geo-coded event data at the incident level, used here to validate and complement MLEED for Central America.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' global climate reanalysis product, providing hourly data at ~31km resolution on temperature, precipitation, wind, humidity, and 200+ variables back to 1940. Used to extract climate shocks at the administrative-unit level.
A multi-scale drought index that combines precipitation and temperature into a single drought severity measure, allowing comparison across regions and time scales (1–48 months). Captures both drought onset and recovery, making it ideal for linking climate stress to conflict and food security.
Maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at UCLouvain, EM-DAT records natural and technological disasters globally since 1900, including deaths, affected populations, and economic damages — used here to capture extreme weather events beyond standard climate indices.
I welcome inquiries about joint research projects and data partnerships.