Tackling Childhood Lead Exposure in Illinois and Leeds
Associate Professor of Economics, Francis J. DiTraglia, University of Oxford
Tuesday, 06 May 2025, 1pm to 2pm
Date and time: Tuesday 6 May, 13:00 hours
Location: L1 Main Meeting Room, Richard Doll Building, Old Road Campus, Headington, OX3 7LF
To Join: This is a free event, which will be taking place both in-person and online via Zoom/Microsoft Teams. Register
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss two of my research projects on the subject of childhood lead exposure. In the first project, my co-authors and I train a random forest regression model on data from Illinois to predict children's blood lead levels (BLLs). We use the model to estimate the geographic distribution of undetected lead poisoning, allowing us to compare the effectiveness of different screening protocols. The second project is an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration, the ECLIPS project, that will design an at-home lead testing protocol and pilot it in Leeds over the next two years.
Bio: Dr. Francis J. DiTraglia is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow and Tutor in Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, and a Visiting Researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His research develops statistical methods for untangling cause-and-effect and uses data to answer economic and public policy questions. In addition to his work on childhood lead exposure, DiTraglia's recent applied research includes an experimental study of pawn lending in Mexico City, and a project that uses economic modeling to understand patterns of paramilitary violence in Colombia during the 1990s and early 2000s. His methodological interests include Bayesian inference, instrumental variables, measurement error, and model selection. DiTraglia is a co-founder of SQARE.org, an initiative that aims to transform research quality assessment in econometrics, and maintains econometrics.blog, where he shares insights on statistical methods and R programming.