Undergraduate-Graduate Research Lab
I’ve led an Undergraduate-Graduate Research Lab (URL) at UC San Diego since Fall 2023, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the job. Each quarter I work with 10-20 undergraduates on real research in development, urban, and education economics, split across two labs: a GIS lab for spatial and satellite data, and a Stata-Python lab for the empirical projects. Everyone works hands-on with Stata, Python, R, and QGIS and presents at the end of the quarter.
Students’ Sample Projects
GIS lab: spatial data
In the GIS lab, we build spatial data from scratch: taking raw satellite images and old paper maps and turning them into something we can actually analyze. Right now that means finding and outlining informal settlements in satellite imagery, digitizing historical maps, and measuring how long it takes people to reach jobs, schools, and services.
Slum Mapping Advanced
Building a protocol to detect and delineate slums in high-resolution Planet satellite imagery and convert it into classified, analysis-ready spatial data, pairing manual image labeling with machine-learning classification. Slides · India & Indonesia · QGIS · Python · ongoing
Digitizing historical maps Advanced
Georeferencing and digitizing historical maps into spatial data. QGIS + Python guide · co-authored with a lab student
Travel time and urban accessibility
Mapping travel times to jobs, schools, and services across urban areas. Slides · QGIS · spatial data
Crime, news, and cities
Scraping Portuguese-language newspaper archives to build a dataset of violence events in Rio's favelas. Slides · earlier slides · Rio de Janeiro · Python
Stata-Python lab: wellbeing, education & talent
Finding "missing talent"
Using national exam data (such as Brazil's ENEM) and new assessments to identify high-potential students. Slides · Central America & Brazil
The economics of sleep
Comparing self-reported and wristband-measured sleep in two field experiments to see who benefits most from sleep interventions. Slides · India & United States · Stata, R
Education and migration
Reviewing and synthesizing the literature linking migration, schooling, and student outcomes. Slides
Compulsory schooling laws across countries
A multi-country dataset compiling compulsory-schooling-law reforms (top-25 countries plus Latin America): policy timing, affected cohorts, and sources, to study effects on schooling. Review slides · Stata
Gender in economics PhD placements Advanced
A semi-automated scraper of PhD job-market placements across economics, business, and public policy, with gender and academic/industry classifiers, feeding an analysis of gender composition and outcomes. Student analysis site · data repo · slides · Python
Outcomes
The students I have worked with at UCSD and beyond have gone on to pursue further education at the University of Michigan, Tufts, and Oxford, and/or have obtained predoctoral fellowships and RA positions at the Federal Reserve, Stanford, and Harvard, among others.
