publications

2023

1. Working Paper

   The Long-run Development Impacts of Agricultural Productivity Gains: Evidence from Irrigation Canals in India

   Sam Asher, Alison Campion, Paul Novosad, and 1 more author

   2023

   HTML

2022

1. IPF

   Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India

   Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Alison Campion, and 2 more authors

   India Policy Forum, 2022

   Abs Bib HTML PDF

   The government generates terabytes of data directly and incidentally in the operation of public programs. For intrinsic and instrumental reasons, these data should be made open to the public. Intrinsically, a right to government data is implicit in the right to information. Instrumentally, open government data will improve policy, increase accountability, empower citizens, create new opportunities for private firms, and lead to development and economic growth. A series of case studies demonstrates these benefits in a range of other contexts. We next examine how government can maximize social benefit from government data. This entails opening administrative data as far upstream in the data pipeline as possible. Most administrative data can be minimally aggregated to protect privacy, while providing data with high geographic granularity. We assess the status quo of the Government of India’s data production and dissemination pipeline, and find that the greatest weakness lies in the last mile: making government data accessible to the public. This means more than posting it online; we describe a set of principles for lowering the access and use costs close to zero. Finally, we examine the use of government data to guide policy in the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil society played a key role in aggregating, disseminating, and analyzing government data, providing analysis that was essential to policy response. However, key pieces of data, like testing rates and sero- prevalence distribution, were unnecessarily withheld by the government, data which could have substantially improved the policy response. A more open approach to government data would have saved many lives.

   @article{asher2022,
     author = {Asher, Sam and Bhowmick, Aditi and Campion, Alison and Lunt, Tobias and Novosad, Paul},
     title = {{Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India}},
     journal = {India Policy Forum},
     year = {2022},
     volume = {18},
     number = {1},
     pages = {1-52},
     month = {},
     keywords = {Open Data; Governance; India; Economic Growth; Public Goods Provision},
     doi = {},
   }

2020

1. BMJ Open

   The COVID-19 mortality effects of underlying health conditions in India: a modelling study

   Paul Novosad, Radhika Jain, Alison Campion, and 1 more author

   Jul 2020

   Abs Bib HTML PDF

   Relative to England, Indians have higher rates of diabetes (10.6% vs 8.5%) and chronic respiratory disease (4.8% vs 2.5%), and lower rates of obesity (4.4% vs 27.9%), chronic heart disease (4.4% vs 5.9%) and cancer (0.3% vs 2.8%). Population COVID-19 mortality in India, relative to England, is most increased by uncontrolled diabetes (+5.67%) and chronic respiratory disease (+1.88%), and most reduced by obesity (−5.47%), cancer (−3.65%) and chronic heart disease (−1.20%). Comorbidities were associated with a 6.26% lower risk of mortality in India compared with England. Demographics and population health explain a third of the difference in share of deaths under age 60 between the two countries. Known COVID-19 health risk factors are not expected to have a large effect on mortality or its age distribution in India relative to England. The high share of COVID-19 deaths from people under age 60 in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remains unexplained. Understanding the mortality risk associated with health conditions prevalent in LMICs, such as malnutrition and HIV/AIDS, is essential for understanding differential mortality.

   @article{novosad2020,
     doi = {10.1101/2020.07.05.20140343},
     year = {2020},
     month = jul,
     publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
     author = {Novosad, Paul and Jain, Radhika and Campion, Alison and Asher, Sam},
     title = {The {COVID}-19 mortality effects of underlying health conditions in India: a modelling study},
   }

2018

1. G³

   Constraining the Timing and Amplitude of Early Serpukhovian Glacioeustasy With a Continuous Carbonate Record in Northern Spain

   Alison Campion, Adam Maloof, Blair Schoene, and 6 more authors

   Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, Aug 2018

   Abs Bib HTML PDF

   During the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA, 345-260 Ma), an expansion of ice house conditions at  30 Ma caused a nearly synchronous, global unconformity. Subaerially exposed paleotropical carbonates were dissolved by meteoric waters, mixed with the light terrestrial carbon, and recrystallized with over- printed, diagenetic d13C values. In Northern Spain, development of a rapidly subsiding foreland basin kept local sea level relatively high, allowing continuous carbonate deposition to record d13C without meteoric overprint. The Spanish sections show a 2 per mil increase in d13C that can be modeled as the ocean’s response to the creation of a significant light carbon sink through widespread meteoric diagenesis of marine carbonates during the near-global hiatus. About 15–35 m of sea level fall would have exposed a large enough volume of carbonate to account for the positive excursion in d13C of oceanic DIC. Combining the d13C data with high resolution biostratigraphy and new ID-TIMS U-Pb zircon ages from interbedded tuffs, we calculate that the depositional hiatus and glacioeustatic fall caused by the early Serpukhovian phase of ice growth lasted for approximately 3.5 My.

   @article{campion2018,
     doi = {10.1029/2017gc007369},
     year = {2018},
     month = aug,
     publisher = {American Geophysical Union ({AGU})},
     volume = {19},
     number = {8},
     pages = {2647--2660},
     author = {Campion, Alison and Maloof, Adam and Schoene, Blair and Oleynik, Sergey and Sanz-L{\'{o}}pez, Javier and Blanco-Ferrera, Silvia and Merino-Tom{\'{e}}, Oscar and Bahamonde, Juan Ram{\'{o}}n and Fern{\'{a}}ndez, Luis Pedro},
     title = {Constraining the Timing and Amplitude of Early Serpukhovian Glacioeustasy With a Continuous Carbonate Record in Northern Spain},
     journal = {Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems},
   }