Dr Julian Dyer
Lecturer in Economics
J.Dyer3@exeter.ac.uk
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Overview
Julian Dyer joined the department as a Lecturer after completing a PhD in Economics at the University of Toronto.
I’m an empirical microeconomist, and I study the economics of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. I'm especially interested in the relationship between institutions, culture and agricultural development.
I pursue these research interests both by doing fieldwork and conducting field experiments, as well as using machine learning and analysis of large text datasets.
In addition to my academic work, I have partnered with a number of non-academic development actors in applied consulting work.
Qualifications
- PhD Economics, University of Toronto
- BA in Economics & African Studies, University of Toronto
Links
Research
Research interests
- Economic Development
- Economics of Culture
- Agricultural and Rural Economics
- Machine Learning & Text Analysis
I study the economics of development, and I'm especially interested in the relationship between institutions, culture and agricultural development.
I pursue this research agenda using fieldwork and field experiments, as well as using machine learning and analysis of large text datasets.
Research projects
I just finished fieldwork for an experiment where I uncover the mechanisms by which crime constrains agricultural development. I show that weak rule of law decreases short-run productivity as well as discouraging behaviours conducive to long-run productivity growth.
I'm also working on a project with Arthur Blouin where we apply machine learning to lexical data and generate a novel pairwise, directed measure of cultural influence in order to understand whether ethnolinguistic groups make strategic investments to decrease their linguistic distance to neighbours.
