Anna Josephson

Street Address

City, State, Zip

Phone Number

Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

Your Custom Text Here

Anna Josephson

My core research focuses on individuals in and households around the world, working on food security, agriculture, and decision-making. Much of this research is centered in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, as well as Asia, including Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines. In my work, I explore the relationships between individuals and their risky environments and investigate how households make decisions to ensure their survival, recovery, and resilience under challenging conditions and through the experience of shocks and stresses.

I also study the process of economic research, including instructional pedagogy, ethics in research, and gender in the profession. I am a Catalyst with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. My book with Jeffrey Michler, Research Ethics in Applied Economics: A Practical Guide, is now available from Routledge and Amazon.

See below for some of my ongoing work.

Economic development and food security

Estimating the Impact of Weather on Agriculture: This work seeks to quantify the significance and magnitude of the effect of measurement error in satellite weather data on modeling agricultural production, agricultural productivity, and resilience outcomes. We combine geo-spatial weather data from a variety of satellite sources with the geo-referenced household survey data from seven sub-Saharan African countries that are part of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture initiative. Our goal is to provide systematic evidence on which weather metrics have strong predictive power over a large set of crops and countries and which metrics are only useful in highly specific settings. More details available on OSF with a working paper on arXiv and from the World Bank. Collaborators: T. Kilic (World Bank), J.D. Michler (UArizona), and S. Murray (World Bank).

Our first publication from this project was just published in the Journal of Development Economics: Privacy protection, measurement error, and the integration of remote sensing and socioeconomic survey data.

Impact Assessment of Stress-Tolerant Rice Varieties: Evaluating Impact through Remote Sensing and Econometric Methods: This study assesses the impact of key stress-tolerant rice varieties (STRVs) in South Asia. Combining administrative data on variety release with remote sensing data on rainfall, temperature, and the density of green vegetation (NDVI) and using historic data on rainfall and temperature, we determine the impact of these exogenous weather conditions on the NDVI. Then, using district level data on the release of STRVs, we measure the change in NDVI that occurs after the introduction of STRVs. Collaborators: D.A. Al Rafi (UArizona), R. Mathieu (IRRI), J.D. Michler (UArizona), V. Pede (IRRI), and the Social Pixel Lab (UArizona).

Understanding Intra-Household Poverty and Undernutrition in the Philippines: This work estimates individual consumption to account for intra-household consumption allocation and resource inequality, in order to better understand intra-household poverty and undernutrition in the Philippines. We estimate individual-level poverty rates and diet quality for all members within a household, relying on data from National Nutrition Survey of the Philippines. Combining these data with a structural model of intra-household consumption allocation, we are able to determine nutritional and allocative inequality. Collaborators: F. Dizon (World Bank) and Z. Wang (World Bank).

Crises and resilience

Intra-Household Dynamics, Agriculture, and COVID-19: COVID-19 has impacted agricultural supply chains across the globe and initial reports suggest that the effects of the pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa may be particularly pronounced. This work uses the recently generated data from the LSMS COVID-19 phone surveys to investigate conditions in Africa, focusing on the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and livelihood diversification and agricultural sector participation before the pandemic, as well as household decision-making, bargaining, and equity and the relationship with household coping, mitigating, and surviving COVID-19. Learn more by visiting our Github Repo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4060416). Collaborators: A. Furbush (UArizona), T. Kilic (World Bank), J.D. Michler (UArizona), L. Rudin-Rush (UArizona).

Three recent publications from this research:

Food Insecurity During the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Four African Countries in Food Policy, with L. Rudin-Rush, J. Michler, and J. Bloem.
The evolving socioeconomic impacts of Covid-19 in four African countries, in VoxEU and CEPR’s Shaping Africa’s Post-Covid Recovery.
Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19 in low-income countries, in Nature Human Behaviour, with T. Kilic and J.D. Michler.

Measuring food security in disasters: Current food insecurity measures have been used in disaster contexts, but there are distinct challenges to food security in a post-disaster context. Providing sufficient calories while also addressing dietary quality and nutrition is difficult to do in a disaster setting, with widespread disruption to infrastructure, supply chains, and organizational and social systems. Thus, this research works to establish a new metric that captures dimensions of food insecurity affected in a disaster context is necessary to improve food security measurement, better estimate food insecurity prevalence during community-level disruptions, and enhance emergency food assistance to support families coping with widespread disruption to infrastructure, supply chains, organizational and social networks, personal property, and daily routines. Collaborators: E. Biehl (JHU), L. Clay (NYU), R. Neff (JHU), M. Niles (UVM), S. Rogus (NMSU).

A publication from this project was just published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: A Mixed-Methods Approach to the Development of a Disaster Food Security Framework.

Measuring outcomes of humanitarian assistance: Humanitarian assistance minimizes the human and material losses in the immediate aftermath of social and environmental shocks. Focused on emergency programming activities (e.g., local early warning systems, disaster risk reduction governance, livelihood diversification strategies), this work develops methods and indicators that reflect adaptations in behaviors and landscape uses spurred by emergency programming activities. Funded by USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, this work aims to develop tools for improved evaluation of programming outcomes.