I am passionate about bridging the gap between research and policymaking to improve the livelihoods of citizens throughout the world. Too often, public policies and decision-making are driven by ideology, ignorance, and inertia.1 At the World Bank, I contribute to informing the design and implementation of public policies by working directly with governments and generating data and evidence on the impact of public policies.
One key aspect of my work is leveraging the underutilized administrative data of governments and judiciaries. By combining this data with experiments and machine learning, governments have a wide range of opportunities to diagnose key challenges affecting citizens and develop solutions to address them. For instance, in my projects we have built innovative data tools that are enabling judiciaries to reduce adjournments and boost judicial efficiency, identify threats to equitable justice such as gender and ethnic biases, and improve the training and judicial performance of judges and civil servants. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am also leveraging publicly available, real-time data such as Google Trends to anticipate COVID-19 cases and examine the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.
Key government partners include the Kenyan Judiciary, the Court-Annexed Mediation department in Kenya, the Peruvian Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the Judicial Academy of Peru, and the Chilean Administrative Corporation of the Judiciary, among others. I also have prior policy experience working with governments at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in France and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Paraguay.
Publications in the policy sphere:
- Government Analytics Using Machine Learning (with S. Bhupatiraju, D. Chen, S. Jankin, M. Kupi), The Government Analytics Handbook: Leveraging Data to Strengthen Public Administration. World Bank Publications, 2023
- Transforming Justice in the Middle East and North Africa through Data (with D. Chen), chapter in A New State of Mind: Greater Transparency and Accountability in the Middle East and North Africa. MENA Economic Update; October 2022. Washington, DC : World Bank
- DIME Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC) Program (with G. Bedoya D. Chen, T. Scot, A. Legovini, S. Milusheva, C. Piza)
- Digitalization of Justice: The Impact of Judicial Speed on Firm Outcomes in Croatia (with D. Chen), World Bank, 2021. “Data, Digitalization, and Governance” Europe and Central Asia Economic Update (Spring), Washington, DC: World Bank.
Blogs:
- The pandemic unfolds on Google (Part 1): A new global dashboard for COVID-19 monitoring
- The pandemic unfolds on Google (Part 2): COVID-19 trends in Brazil
Discussions:
- Presentation at the World Bank’s MENA Chief Economist Office on “The Role of Justice in Development: The Data Revolution”
- Stanford Valedictorian Speech: “The Dreams of Tomorrow Start Today“
References
- Banerjee, A., Duflo, E. (2012). Poor economics. PublicAffairs.