Earth & Evidence Lab

Causal inference with remote sensing and micro-level data on agriculture, environment and natural hazards, Ankara University

We study how natural hazards and public policies change agriculture, land and the environment. Our recent work measures how the 2023 earthquakes changed crop production and whether they changed voting in Turkiye, how sinkholes and a water-saving policy changed farmers' crop choices, why farmers burn stubble, how climate change affects wheat, and what land consolidation and inheritance do to farmland. We build our datasets from satellite imagery and from micro-level administrative records, such as the Farmer Registry System, village-level farm insurance files and court auction records. We use causal inference methods to measure effects. Our home is the Department of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Agriculture, Ankara University.

People

Alper Demirdogen, lab lead

Emine Olhan

Mensur Öztürk, PhD student, earthquakes and crop production around the world

Alper İpek, PhD student, climate-related disasters and farm insurance at village level

Current projects

Land consolidation seen from satellite imagery. We train an image classifier on satellite imagery of 668 Central Anatolian villages to date when each village's field pattern changed. We then estimate the program's effects with a staggered difference-in-differences design.

Earthquakes and crop production around the world (PhD thesis, Mensur Öztürk). We combine satellite greenness data with shaking-intensity maps to measure how earthquakes change planted area and yields in farming systems with different levels of mechanization.

Climate-related disasters and farm insurance (PhD thesis, Alper İpek). We use village-level insurance records from Turkiye to measure how climate-related disasters change insurance use.

The value of attachment to inherited land. We use nearly ten thousand court auctions in central Turkiye to measure how much more heirs pay than outside buyers for the same land.

Funding

Ankara University Research Fund, project FBA-2025-4282, led by Alper Demirdogen: earthquakes and agriculture in Turkiye

TÜBİTAK 2219 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship: University of Geneva, 2020–2021

TÜBİTAK 2214-A International Research Fellowship for PhD Students: University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2014–2015

Contact

Alper Demirdogen, Department of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Agriculture, Ankara University | demirdogen@ankara.edu.tr