José Ignacio Cuesta
King Center on Global Development
Assistant Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
Faculty Fellow
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
José Ignacio Cuesta is an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University, a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, a Faculty Fellow at SIEPR, and J-PAL invited researcher. He obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2019. His research focuses on the design and regulation of credit and health markets. His previous research studies the design of interest rate caps, the impacts of information frictions in mortgage markets, the design of public procurement and public provision of pharmaceutical drugs, among others.
King Center Supported Research
2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding
Agriculture, Human Capital, and Public Health in Egypt
The global landscape of cotton farming was transformed by cotton capitalists, in Egypt global demand for cotton and shocks to cotton pricing enforced changes in labor patterns and irrigation infrastructure during colonial times. The immediate and lasting consequences of these agricultural shifts on the development of the communities involved are still not completely empirically fully explored in Middle Eastern countries like Egypt. This project is aims at reshaping our understanding of the short and long-run impacts of agricultural labor policies and poorly implemented modernization projects set under colonialism, focusing particularly on implications for education, and public health.
An innovative aspect of this project lies in its use of developments in machine learning and computer vision to convert and examine vast quantities of historical data that were once difficult to handle. Available data to study these topics, especially in the Middle East, tend to be scarce. Historical maps and Arabic text are excellent sources of data, however, processing proved previously to be difficult and require innovative techniques. By applying new cutting-edge AI technologies, he plans to extract valuable information from various archival resources, with the ultimate goal to utilize this extracted data to explore significant issues related to the political economy of development.