Martina Jakob

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich, specializing in development economics and public economics. My research combines randomized controlled trials with big data and machine or deep learning methods to study topics such as education, institutions, land markets, and inequality. Through my work, I want to contribute to effective policy-making to improve living conditions in low- and middle-income countries.

I am also the founder and president of Consciente, a non-profit organization working for quality education in El Salvador. Consciente pursues an evidence-based approach and presently employs over 50 staff members in El Salvador.

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Research

Job Market Paper

Top Down or Bottom Up? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Public Goods Provision
Joint with Carla Coccia.

Bottom-up initiatives have become a popular alternative to the traditional top-down provision of local public goods. This study compares the effectiveness of these two approaches. Based on a randomized controlled trial with 120 communities in rural El Salvador, we assess the impact of two interventions addressing solid waste contamination: (i) top-down service delivery through external cleaning teams, and (ii) capacity building for bottom-up provision through local facilitators. Using an objective measure of pollution based on geotagged photos and deep learning, we find large immediate effects for both interventions, with reductions in waste by 40 percent for the top-down intervention and 30 percent for the bottom-up intervention. Despite requiring twice the monetary investment and triple the total resources including volunteer time, the bottom-up intervention showed no clear sustainability advantages, with effects diminishing substantially for both approaches four months after the withdrawal of support. Our complementary data from 2,421 surveys and 883 activity records is consistent with a theoretical framework where many individuals are willing to contribute to public goods when others do, but fail to coordinate in the absence of a committed leader.

Publications

Participatory Teaching Improves Learning Outcomes: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Tanzania.
Journal of Development Economics. Forthcoming. Joint with Konstantin Büchel, Daniel Steffen, and Aymo Brunetti.

Inadequate Teacher Content Knowledge and what Could be Done about it: Evidence from El Salvador. Journal of Development Effectiveness. 2023.
Joint with Konstantin Büchel, Daniel Steffen, Ben Jann, and Aymo Brunetti.

The Relative Effectiveness of Teachers and Learning Software: Evidence from a Field Experiment in El Salvador. Journal of Labor Economics. 2022.
Joint with Konstantin Büchel, Christoph Kühnhanss, Daniel Steffen, and Aymo Brunetti.

Educational Aspirations and Decision-Making in a Context of Poverty. A Test of Rational Choice Models in El Salvador. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. 2020.
Joint with Benita Combet.

Working Papers

Measuring Human Capital with Social Media Data and Machine Learning.
R&R Nature Scientific Reports. Joint with Sebastian Heinrich.

Teacher Content Knowledge in Developing Countries: Evidence from a Math Assessment in El Salvador.
Joint with Konstantin Büchel, Christoph Kühnhanss, Daniel Steffen, Ben Jann, and Aymo Brunetti.

When Better Teachers Aren't Enough: Experimental Evidence from El Salvador.
Joint with Carla Coccia, Konstantin Büchel, and Ben Jann.

Work in Progress

Mentors or Messages? Experimental Evidence on Social Support, Information, and School Retention in Rural Guatemala.
Joint with Mauricio Romero, Eric Edmonds, and Carla Coccia.

Land Registration at Scale: Evidence on Tenure Systems from Millions of Parcels and Deep Learning in Uganda.
Joint with Lorenzo Casaburi, Jimmy Alani, Joseph Mivule, and Cissy Namuddu.

State, Companies, Individuals: Trends and Consequences of Land Ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Joint with Lorenzo Casaburi, Jeanne Sorin, Jimmy Alani, Joseph Mivule, and Cissy Namuddu.

School-Based Mental Health Promotion in Low-Resource Settings: Experimental Evidence from School Psychologists and Teacher-Delivered Support in El Salvador.
Joint with Fanny Valli and Miriam Prater.

Teaching

I have designed and taught courses on global development, experimental methods, programming, and deep learning at the BA, MA, and CAS level at the University of Bern. In 2024, I received an award for outstanding performance in teaching. On my GitHub repository a complete introductory Python course I developed for social science students is available (suitable for teaching or self-study). The course is based on interactive Jupyter notebooks and includes tutorials and exercises on the Python syntax, data wrangling, analysis and visualization, web scraping, and text analysis. Please contact me for solutions.

Web Scraping and APIs
with S. Heinrich

CAS lecture

Fall 2021, 2023, 2025

Programming II: Python
with R. Farys

BA lecture

Spring 2023, 2024

Understanding Global Development: Empirical Applications
with M. Prater

BA & MA seminar

Spring 2024

Machine Learning and Artificial Neural Networks
with S. Bahr

BA & MA seminar

Fall 2023

Big Data for Development
with B. Jann

BA & MA seminar

Spring 2021

Introduction to Development Sociology
with C. Kühnhanss

BA seminar

Fall 2019, 2020

Topics in Development Sociology
with C. Kühnhanss

BA & MA seminar

Spring 2020

Impact Evaluations
with C. Kühnhanss & B. Jann

MA seminar

Spring 2019