Mira Korb

I am a development economist, with interests in agriculture, industrialization and environmental degradation.

In my job market paper, I apply large geo-spatial datasets and satellite imagery to examine the extent to which industrial mining activity in developing countries affects local agriculture through pollution externalities versus market based channels. More broadly, I am interested in leveraging non-traditional datasets, such as satellite-imagery or cellphone records, often in combination with machine learning, to answer causal inference questions that would be difficult to otherwise address given data gaps in developing countries. Some of my other research in this area includes estimating the extent to which the capacity of machine learning models used to predict wealth for aid targeting decays over time, as well as developing a methodology to correct for bias in difference-in-difference estimators generated by prediction errors from models using satellite data.

I am currently a PhD candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. Before joining UC Davis, I earned my B.A. in mathematics and economics at the University of Virginia.

I am actively on the job market during the 2024-25 academic year. You can reach me at makorb[at]ucdavis[dot]edu