Presenter: Xiao Hui Tai, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, UC Davis

Description: Beyond immediate loss of life and physical destruction, civil conflict affects societies in myriad ways, many of which are difficult to quantify. In this work, we study the effect of conflict on economic activity, in the form of seasonal labor migration. The context that we study is opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, an illicit industry that employs a large number of seasonal workers in well-paid jobs. We use satellite imagery to infer peak agricultural activity, and a measurement strategy that exploits this timing, to estimate seasonal labor flows using anonymized mobile phone metadata. We find that on average, high-poppy cultivating districts have excess in migration during the harvest of 3% more than the baseline, compared to districts with no poppy cultivation. We then examine how conflict in the form of shorter-term violent events and longer-term territorial control affects this relationship. We find that labor flows are resilient to shorter-term occurrences of violent events. Workers are not repelled by violence at the destination, nor are they encouraged by violence at the source to participate in seasonal work. On the other hand, labor flows are shaped by longer term patterns of conflict. In this particular context, we find evidence that the presence of insurgents are associated with larger labor flows, both at the source and at the destination.

Bio: Xiao Hui Tai is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics at U.C. Davis. She is interested in using large-scale, granular sources of data, and statistical and machine learning methods, to measure and study human behavior. Much of her work uses non-traditional data, such as those from mobile phones and satellite imagery, to study problems in conflict and the developing world. Previously, Xiao Hui was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. She was previously a statistician with the government in Singapore, and also spent some time as a quantitative modeler at J.P. Morgan Chase.

Hosted by: Professor Sangwon Hyun and Professor Sheng Jiang

Zoom link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94312221886?pwd=YVhkeDJnOTAwYzB1VmxRRWxaVExOQT09