Shocks and Social Safety Net Program Participation in Ghana

My colleague and I just had our study published. The study discusses the association between household exposure to negative shocks and social safety net program participation in Ghana. To examine this issue, we link data from high-resolution geospatial maps of drought and flood risks to government administrative data on safety net program beneficiaries at the district level. We find that drought risk is positively associated with household participation in selected, main public social safety net programs. (The corresponding evidence for flood risk is weaker). We interpret the finding to be a result of pre-shock program coverage of drought-prone areas, in part achieved indirectly through the intentional targeting of poor areas by the programs.

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Mapping the Matrix: Malaysia's Corporate Network

The complex interconnections that define modern society are readily visible in our Facebook or LinkedIn networks. But what about the corporate world? I recently began mapping the web of cross-shareholding among Malaysia's listed corporations. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA), I visualized the ecosystem to identify key "communities" and power brokers. The goal? To see if a company's position in this web predicts its financial destiny. The State of Play (2015) Figure 1: Malaysia's Corporate Network in 2015 (Created via Gephi) The map above visualizes the network as of 2015. While I have excluded specific company names, the "super-nodes" (the largest circles) represent the most connected shareholders in the economy—primarily government-linked investment companies (GLICs), fund managers, and international asset managers. A Decade of Growing Complexity ...

Turkey's Informality Tax

A general-equilibrium model of Turkey's dual labour market says the cost of taxing formal work doesn't show up where we usually look for it. The bottomline: Making Turkey's transfer to the unemployed a third more generous raises unemployment from 8.6% to 9.2% . That is the honest cost, and it is not large. How you pay for it matters more than whether you pay for it. Funded by payroll taxes, the poor end up 0.6% worse off than before the transfer was raised — the policy defeats itself. Funded by VAT, they are 0.5% better off . The reason is not unemployment, which is nearly identical under both. It is informality . A higher payroll tax pushes formal jobs into the unregistered sector, where the wage is 43% lower and nothing is taxed. Turkey is not on the wrong side of the payroll-tax Laffer curve — revenue peaks around 53%, well above today's ~37.5% wedge. But the marginal cost...

Mapping the Blast Radius: What Happens When the "World's Factory" Stops?

In global trade, "efficiency" often masks "fragility." We know that China is central to the global electronics supply chain, but how central? And if that node were to go dark, who would feel the shockwaves first? To answer this, I moved beyond standard trade statistics and built a network simulation using the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) Tables (2023 Edition) . This dataset maps the DNA of the global economy, tracking every dollar of input across 66 countries and 45 industries. 1. The Blast Radius: Tracing the Contagion I treated the global economy as a directed graph and simulated a total supply shock to Chinese Electronics (CHN_C26) . By tracing the flow of inputs across three tiers of buyers, I visualized the "Blast Radius" of this disruption. Fig 1: The Supply Chain Cascade. The shock originates in China (Red) and immediately hits "Tier 1" assembly hubs (Dark Blue) before cascading to global consumers...