10 papers
Platonic Representations for Poverty Mapping: Unified Vision-Language Codes or Agent-Induced Novelty?
Satiyabooshan Murugaboopathy, Connor T. Jerzak, Adel Daoud
We investigate whether socioeconomic indicators, like household wealth, leave recoverable informational imprints in both satellite imagery (capturing features like buildings and ro…
Temporal Dynamics of Development Aid in Africa: Evidence from a Staggered Difference-in-Differences Study of China and World Bank Projects
Mattias Antar, Adel Daoud, Connor T. Jerzak
Subnational studies of aid effectiveness often rely on repeated cross-sections or nighttime lights, making it difficult to separate local treatment effects from baseline difference…
Chinese vs. World Bank Development Projects: Insights from Earth Observation and Computer Vision on Wealth Gains in Africa, 2002-2013
Adel Daoud, Cindy Conlin, Connor T. Jerzak
Debates about whether development projects improve living conditions persist, partly because observational estimates can be biased by incomplete adjustment and because reliable out…
Detecting and Mitigating Treatment Leakage in Text-Based Causal Inference: Distillation and Sensitivity Analysis
Adel Daoud, Richard Johansson, Connor T. Jerzak
Text-based causal inference increasingly employs textual data as proxies for unobserved confounders, yet this approach introduces a previously undertheorized source of bias: treatm…
Beyond Interaction Effects: Two Logics for Studying Population Inequalities
Adel Daoud
When sociologists and other social scientist ask whether the return to college differs by race and gender, they face a choice between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry.…
Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: "One Map, Many Trials" in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis
Markus B. Pettersson, Connor T. Jerzak, Adel Daoud
Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting household-level wealth indices, enabling t…