Projects

IPEG's current portfolio

Inequality in real time

The Inequality Tracker is a pioneering project that aims to track developments in inequality and the role played by the welfare state in Spain in real time using techniques based on big data. It is a novel initiative carried out by a team made up of researchers from the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) and CaixaBank Research that shows the enormeous potential of the collaboration of researchers of private companies and research centers.

Visit the Inequality Tracker

Measuring inequality from above

The project builds inequality measures using satellite imagery (night lighting and day), which for the first time allows to obtain detailed calculations of inequality for very small areas. A random forest algorithm classifies the areas according to the divergence with the inequality measure obtained using the traditional method, based on surveys, at different level of aggregation (country, regions, etc.)

Video

Bank transactions international dashboard

This project relates to a number of new initiatives, triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, which use big data to track economic activity in real-time.
In particular, many of these approaches use bank transactions data (usually credit/debit cards, and PoS) to track spending by sectors at very hight frequency. This analysis helps to fine-tune economic policies. However, there is substantial heterogeneity, given the novelty, on the treatment of seasonality, criteria to select the sample, sectoral classifiction, etc. The project BTID tries to homogenaize the information of 11 countries. The information will be included in a dashboard where interested researcher will be able graph the magnitudes of interest and download them. This project is a joint initiative with the CEPR and LSE. 

Visit the dashboard (under construction)