Adam Storeygard

Tufts University | Tufts

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant road construction as a source of exogenous variation,...

Transport investment has played an important role in the economic development of many countries. Starting from a low base, African countries have recently initiated several massive transportation infrastructure projects. However, surprisingly little is known about the current levels, past evolution, and correlates of transportation infrastructure i...

UNGATED FULL TEXT AVAILABLE HERE: https://sites.google.com/site/adamstoreygard/hssw.pdf We explore the role of natural characteristics in determining the worldwide spatial distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, observed across 240,000 grid cells. A parsimonious set of 24 physical geography attributes explains 47% of worl...

UNGATED FULL TEXT AVAILABLE HERE: http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jep.30.4.171 The past decade or so has seen a dramatic change in the way that economists can learn by watching our planet from above. A revolution has taken place in remote sensing and allied fields such as computer science, engineering, and geography. Petabytes of satellite imagery have...

UNGATED FULL TEXT AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5404830/ This paper documents strong but differentiated links between climate and urbanization in large panels of districts and cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has dried substantially in the past fifty years. The key dimension of heterogeneity is whether cities are...

We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on dowry deaths using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002-2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported dowry deaths by 7.8 percent. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. We examine patterns of other crimes to investigate whether an increase i...

This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income of sub-Saharan African cities. In particular, focusing on fifteen countries whose largest city is a port, I find that an oil price increase of the magnitude experienced between 2002 and 2008 induces the income of cities near that port to increase by 7 percent r...

The quantity of human-generated light visible from outer space reflects variation in both population density and income per capita. In this paper we explore the usefulness of the change in visible light as a measure of GDP growth. We discuss the data, and then present a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth...

We examine the effect of local precipitation shocks on appropriation risk faced by women and disadvantaged minorities using annual data for 583 districts in India for the period 2001-2007. We use annual fluctuations of rainfall from the long term mean to isolate the effects of rain shocks on crimes against women and scheduled caste minorities. We f...

We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventionally measured growth and growth predicted from lights. Our estimates differ from official data by...

The Millennium Development Goals (MIDGs) have put maternal health in the mainstream, but there is a need to go beyond the MDGs to address equity within countries. We argue that MDG focus on maternal health is necessary but not sufficient. This paper uses Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana to examine a set of mat...

We describe the compilation of a spatially explicit data-set detailing infant mortality rates in over 10,000 national and subnational units worldwide, benchmarked to the year 2000. Although their resolution is highly variable, subnational data are available for countries representing over 90% of the non-OECD population. Concentration of global infa...

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are a significant burden on global economies and public health. Their emergence is thought to be driven largely by socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors, but no comparative study has explicitly analysed these linkages to understand global temporal and spatial patterns of EIDs. Here we analyse a dat...

This analysis seeks to set the stage for equity-sensitive monitoring of the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). We use data from international household-level surveys (Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)) to demonstrate that establishing an equity baseline is necessary and feasible, eve...

OBJECTIVE: This analysis seeks to set the stage for equity-sensitive monitoring of the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). METHODS: We use data from international household-level surveys (Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)) to demonstrate that establishing an equity baseline is necessa...

Using two complementary methods in a framework that allows incorporating both environmental and household-level factors, we explore the correlates of underweight status among children. We use individual children as the units of analysis in 19 African countries, and subnational survey strata in 43 African, Asian and Latin American countries. We cons...

This paper reports on a collection of recent efforts to integrate global spatial datasets and survey microdata to investigate drivers of hunger and infant mortality. They were motivated by a desire on the part of the United Nations Millennium Project to understand the conditions under which the world's poor and hungry live, for the purpose of impro...

It is suggested that environmental or geographical factors (e.g. population density, climate and disease environment) play an important role in determining infant and child survival above and beyond that played by individual and household level factors. Only recently, however, have relevant spatial data become available and have demographic survey...

The author created a sculpture using a rigorous mathematical procedure informed by aesthetic decisions. The form is based on the relationships found in the golden triangle and its spiral folded into three dimensions. In creating the form, the author discovered a three-dimensional motif (the golden gnomonoid) with interesting mathematical properties...

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