About

I’m a development economist interested in the role of information-communication technologies (ICTs) and the use of novel GIS data and methods to study conflict, crime, and public health.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Criminology
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Economic growth
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Demographic economics
• Business
• Finance
• Law

Selected publications

• Polling Place Matters: How Voting Location Influences Election Fraud

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• When does crime respond to punishment?: Evidence from drug-free school zones

  Journal of Urban Economics · 2025-04-17

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Monitoring Corruption: Can Top-Down Monitoring Crowd Out Grassroots Participation?

  Economic Development and Cultural Change · 2024-03-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of grassroots monitoring is mixed. This paper proposes a previously unexplored mechanism that may explain this result. We argue that the presence of effective top-down monitoring alternatives can undermine citizen participation in the monitoring process. Using Olken’s (2009) road-building field experiment, we find that the effect of grassroots monitoring on missing expenditures drops by more than 90% in villages where a government audit is also implemented. We find evidence of crowding-out effects: in audit villages, individuals are less likely to attend, talk at, and actively participate in accountability meetings.

  PublisherDOI

• Is the phone mightier than the virus? Cellphone access and epidemic containment efforts

  Journal of Development Economics · 2023-12-14 · 2 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Are socio-demographic and economic characteristics good predictors of misinformation during an epidemic?

  PLOS Global Public Health · 2022-03-16 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We combine data on beliefs about the origin of the 2014 Ebola outbreak with two supervised machine learning methods to predict who is more likely to be misinformed. Contrary to popular beliefs, we uncover that, socio-demographic and economic indicators play a minor role in predicting those who are misinformed: misinformed individuals are not any poorer, older, less educated, more economically distressed, more rural, or ethnically different than individuals who are informed. However, they are more likely to report high levels of distrust, especially towards governmental institutions. By distinguishing between types of beliefs, distrust in the central government is the primary predictor of individuals assigning a political origin to the epidemic, while Muslim religion is the most important predictor of whether the individual assigns a supernatural origin. Instead, educational level has a markedly higher importance for ethnic beliefs. Taken together, the results highlight that government trust might play the most important role in reducing misinformation during epidemics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan

  London School of Economics and Political Science Theses Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · 2021-11-29

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Blumenstock, Joshua E., Callen, Michael, Ghani, Tarek, and Gonzalez, Robert, (2024) “Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan.” Review of Economics and Statistics 106:2, 352–369.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cell Phone Access and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design in Afghanistan

  American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 2021-03-29 · 31 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the impact of cell phone access on election fraud. I combine cell phone coverage maps with the location of polling centers during the 2009 Afghan presidential election to pinpoint which centers were exposed to coverage. Results from a spatial regression discontinuity design along the two-dimensional coverage boundary suggest that coverage deters corrupt behavior. Polling centers just inside coverage report a drop in the share of fraudulent votes of 4 percentage points, while the likelihood of a fraudulent station decreases by 8 percentage points. Analyses of the effect of coverage on citizen participation in election monitoring, election-related insurgent violence, and the tribal composition of villages suggest that the observed declines in fraud are likely attributed to cell phone access strengthening social monitoring capacity. (JEL D72, K16, K42, O17, Z13)

  PublisherDOI

• Can Community Crime Monitoring Reduce Student Absenteeism?

  Education Finance and Policy · 2021-09-13 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction in the elementary school-level absence rate in the years following initial implementation. We discuss and explore potential channels to explain this and believe our results are most consistent with improved neighborhood conditions in the form of reduced crime as an underlying mechanism.

  PublisherDOI

• Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2021 · 32 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Economics

  Abstract We provide evidence that violence reduces the adoption and use of mobile money in three separate empirical settings in Afghanistan. First, analyzing nationwide mobile money transaction logs, we find that users exposed to violence reduce use of mobile money. Second, using panel survey data from a field experiment, we show that subjects expecting violence are significantly less likely to respond to random inducements to use mobile money. Finally, analyzing nationwide financial survey data, we find that individuals expecting violence hold more cash. Collectively, this evidence suggests that violence can impede the growth of formal financial systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Community Monitoring and Crime: Evidence from Chicago's Safe Passage Program

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Criminology
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Komisarow

  4 shared

• Elisa M. Maffioli

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Ranae Jabri

  Duke University

  2 shared

• Donna B. Gilleskie

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared

• S. Fliscounakis

  2 shared

• Foteini Tzachrista

  2 shared

• Michael Callen

  2 shared

• Tarek Ghani

  2 shared

Labs

• CLEAR Economics LabPI

Education

• PhD, Economics

  University of North Carolina