Working papers

• Pre-analysis plan for ‘Estimating adult mortality using sampled social network data: evidence from Brazil’ (Working paper coming soon)
• Inequality and fairness: A networked experiment
• Survey methods for estimating the size of weak-tie networks

Recent and forthcoming publications

• In a stationary population, the average lifespan of the living is a length-biased life expectancy (Accepted at Demography)

• Estimating adult death rates from sibling histories: A network approach

• Quantifying population contact patterns in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic

• How do populations aggregate?

• Using an online sample to learn about an offline population; arxiv version

• Separating the signal from the noise: Evidence for deceleration in old-age death rates; arxiv version; R package and code

• The network survival method for estimating adult mortality: Evidence from a survey experiment in Rwanda

• Quantity Versus Quality: A Survey Experiment to Improve the Network Scale-up Method

• Generalizing the Network Scale-Up Method: A New Estimator for the Size of Hidden Populations

Data collection

	Brazil My collaborators and I designed and implemented the largest network scale-up survey ever conducted, with n=25,000 respondents in 27 Brazilian cities. The survey allows me to apply the new method I develop in my dissertation to estimate adult death rates and out-migration rates in each city. For deaths and out-migration, there are gold-standard rates we can validate the new method against, meaning that we will have 27 different tests of the new method's accuracy for two different quantities.
	Rwanda My collaborators and I designed and implementated a large, nationally-representative household survey from Rwanda (n=5,000). We collected the data needed to produce adult death rate estimates using the new method. (Adult death rates aren't known in Rwanda, and new techniques like the one my dissertation is based on are needed to estimate them.) We also conducted a survey experiment that showed that there may be a trade-off between the quantity and quality of information collected in a scale-up study. Our experimental design can serve as a template for future scale-up studies that seek to produce substantive estimates while simultaneously using an experiment to learn more about the methodology used to produce scale-up estimates.

Dissertation

My dissertation focused on a new way to estimate adult mortality rates in poor countries where there are currently no reliable data on deaths. This problem is important because, as long as we can’t figure out how to measure adult mortality in the world’s poorest countries, we can’t measure life expectancy, understand the full impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or investigate socioeconomic differences in health. In my dissertation, I develop a new method for estimating adult death rates from a household survey. The new strategy – which builds on existing techniques from demography, sociology, and anthropology – is based on the idea that we can ask survey respondents to tell us about deaths in their personal networks to learn about deaths in the general population. I apply the new method in a large household survey conducted in 27 Brazilian cities (see below). I also apply the method in a nationally-representative household survey from Rwanda, which is a country where adult death rates aren’t known, and new techniques are needed to estimate them (see below). Although my dissertation focuses on adult mortality, the new technique could be applied to estimate many other quantities that are currently hard to measure.