Prashant Garg

Doom loop of decline: how struggling high streets fuel far-right sympathies in UK Retail accounts for 5% of the UK economy – but its visibility gives it an outsize influence on public perception

Great to see our paper -- with @trfetzer.com and @prashantgarg.bsky.social -- on local decline in the UK featured in this Guardian piece.
www.theguardian.com/business/202...

🔗 Read the full preprint: www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

Note: this replaces our earlier pre-print "The Changing Geography of Medical Research"

10/ Yes: outbreaks trigger rapid *and durable* rises in research attention.
Responses are much stronger in the 2010s than before and biggest for high-salience threats.
Capacity matters too: internet penetration, population structure, and research strength predict bigger mobilization.

9/ What about sudden shocks: Ebola, Zika, COVID?
Do countries ramp up research when health emergencies hit?
We test this using 3,134 WHO Disease Outbreak News alerts as quasi-random shocks to disease salience.

8/ In low-income countries, responsiveness growth depends heavily on these actors.
Without philanthropy, responsiveness growth would shrink by ~38%.
Without government support, by ~32%.
(And similar patterns show up in lower-middle-income settings.)

7/ Funders fund differently.
🔹 Philanthropies → neglected burdens (HIV/NTDs/nutrition)
🔹 Corporations → profitable chronic diseases (cardio, cancer, diabetes/kidney)
🔹 Governments/public → somewhere in between

6/ Even after conditioning on burden, some topics are consistently over-/under-studied:
Over: cardiovascular (+16.5%), digestive (+14.1%)
Under: nutritional deficiencies (−14.4%), maternal & neonatal (−12.4%)
So need ≠ attention (yet).

5/ The bad news: participation is still lopsided.
The Global South often appears more as a research setting than a research author.
Example: for neglected tropical diseases & malaria, Africa is 33% of research context, but only 14% of authorship.

4/ Research is getting less geographically concentrated over time, and “endemic responsiveness”
(elasticity of publications to domestic DALYs) has more than doubled since 1990.

3/ Cardio + cancer dominate papers, while respiratory infections/TB + maternal–neonatal + nutrition + many infectious diseases carry *much* higher burden than their paper ranks suggest.
but there's good news....

2/ We link a million papers (524 journals) to (i) diseases + (ii) geographic study context using LLM + (iii) author countries.
We find that the mismatch is real...

Does science follow where people are sick and does it mobilize when outbreaks hit?

@zhou-hy.bsky.social, @trfetzer.com and I answer just that in our revised paper.

1/ A short thread for highlights 👇

Thanks. Yes very related

“When researchers randomly displayed these flood risk estimates to 18M people browsing Redfin, those who saw the feature were more likely to search for homes w/ low flood risk, according to a working paper published in the Nat’l Bureau of Economic Research last Nov*.”🧪

* www.nber.org/papers/w33119

Thanks!

Cool new data set from @reubenhurst.bsky.social and coauthors: politicsatwork.org

Associated papers:
-Political segregation in the US workplace papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
-VRscores: A New Measure and Dataset of Workforce Politics Using Voter Registrations
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

TOMORROW (12 November): AYEW Big Data/Machine Learning Workshop!

Join us at 9pm AEDT (10am GMT) to @prashantgarg.bsky.social (@imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social), Zhenkai (Cambridge), Saani (University of Cincinnati), Luka (@ucsandiego.bsky.social )

Sign up for Zoom link: monash.edu/business/imp...

Can AI tell us anything meaningful about Bob Dylan’s songs? Delighted to share a new essay in @aeon.co breaking down an artists' evolution using AI extracted idea graphs.
aeon.co/essays/can-a...

we're hiring assistant professor in computational social science, applications close 26/10/2025

Not long left to apply for our Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science vacancy❗

📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

Delighted to share this new work. Check this thread by @zhou-hy.bsky.social. We use LLMs to analyse medical research to see whether it responds to local disease burdens.

New paper on where medical research happens vs where disease burden is.

any reviews?

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you.

Apply by: 10 Oct

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Happy to share this paper. Full thread coming soon!

🚨 Tariffs on inputs = tax on downstream products.🚨

Here’s cement’s granular production network. A 50% duty on key inputs propagates costs through roads, buildings, data-centres, and renewable infrastructure.

Public data, method & our paper in thread 🧵 0/8

8/8 Explore the data, methods and paper at aipnet.io. Bonus: Here's input/output links for another related product, Tin.

7/ Our paper finds that global supply shocks on internationally traded goods have become more prevalent since 2016, particularly affecting consumer goods and processed intermediates. Here's a map of these supply shocks. Post 2024 map, when data updates, will likely be worse...

6/ Diverging strategies of U.S. vs. China in global trade. China: Importing more upstream products like Cement to build advanced domestic industries. US: Importing more downstream goods, relying on global supply chains.

5/ The pending 15% baseline tariff agreement between the US and EU may impact 12 million tonnes of transatlantic clinker, reshaping supply chains, alongside ongoing 50% US steel duties