Salfo Bikienga (sbikienga@huskers.unl.edu)
1240 R Street
Lincoln, NE 68588
(402) 472-3442
EDUCATION
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
2010 - present: PhD Candidate in Economics & Statistics
Dissertation topic: Leadership and Economic Growth: A Text Analytics Approach
Expected Completion date: May 2016
University of Ouagadougou
DEA (Masters) in Economics, 2006
Maitrise (Bachelor) in Business Administration with a minor in Economics, 2004
RESEARCH
INTERESTS
Economics
Development Economics
Statistics
Text Data Analysis: Topic Modelling
High Dimensional Data Reduction
TEACHING
EXPERIENCE
Spring 2015: Introduction to Statistics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Business
School
Summer 2014: Introduction to Statistics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Business School
Spring 2014: Introduction to Statistics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Business
School
Summer 2011: Principle of Economics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Business
School, TA for Pr. Anne May
RESEARCH
EXPERIENCE
2010 - 2015: University of Nebraska- Lincoln, Research Assistant for Prof. Thompson and Prof. Rosenbaum
SKILLS
Languages: English (fluent), French (native), Spanish (basic)
Computer: R (advanced user), SAS (some experience), Stata (some experience),
High Performance Computing
HONORS AND
FELLOWSHIPS
2015 - 2016: McConnell Fellowship, and J.J. and Elanor S. Ogle Fellowship
2013 - 2015: J.J. and Elanor S. Ogle Fellowship
2013 - 2014: Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student; Department of economics, College of Business Administration, University of Nebraska
Lincoln.
2010 - 2012: J.J. and Elanor S. Ogle Fellowship
Salfo Bikienga
Page 2
WORKING
PAPERS
Leadership and Economic Growth: A Text Analytics Approach
In recent years, many economists have acknowledged the importance of political
leaders for economic growth. However, proving the relationship between leadership and economic growth remains challenging. The challenge is becoming less
stringent in this age of big data. New statistical tools exist to explore new types of
data. This paper proposes a text analytics approach to studying political leadership
and economic growth. It shows that text analytics is a viable tool for analyzing
leaders’ discourses, and the relationship between these discourses and economic
growth. Using U.S governors’ state of the state speeches from 2001 to 2012, it
is shown that what governors say in their speeches is strongly associated with
economic growth.
Restricted Topic Modelling
One challenge for topic modeling is the choice of the optimum number of topics,
K, for a given corpus. Most proposed methods rely on the marginal model likelihood to select K. Unlike numerical data, with text data, the underlying semantic
patterns are not unique since different topics can be collapsed into bigger topics,
or split into smaller topics. Thus, extra care must be taken in the definition of
optimum K. The current paper proposes a method that selects K such that the
topics obtained are meaningful for explaining some relevant dependent variables.
Conditions are imposed to achieve such optimality. K must be model driven, must
be small, discriminative, and hopefully interpretable. Our preliminary results appeared encouraging.
Human Capital Measurement: A Quantiles Regression Approach”
(with Prof. Rosenbaum, and Dr. Thompson)
This paper estimates the per capita annual human capital for all U.S. states, for
every year, from 1990 to 2012 using the Labor Income Based Measure of Human
Capital approach. The estimations are performed under the Quantiles Regressions
framework in acknowledgment of the inappropriateness of the OLS framework in
the context of obvious deviation from the normal distribution of the income distribution. We find that, in all states, the average human capital has increased
during the period 1990 to 2012. However, notable differences exist among states.
Some gender and racial differences are also observed. Level of education is, of
course, a key ingredient of human capital. Most groups (of education level) have
seen a steady increase of their return to human capital (and thus their Human
Capital Stock) over the study period. Notably, individuals with more than a bachelor degree have seen an even greater increase of the value of their human capital
stock.
PRESENTATIONS
2014 AUBER Conference in Portland, Oregon (Poster Presentation)
2013 AUBER Conference in Richmond, Virginia (Oral Presentation)
INSTITUTIONAL
SERVICE
Summer 2015 Present: Graduate mentor for undergraduate student research
project. Title of the project: Per Student Public Spending and academic achievement: The case of Omaha Public School District
Currently serving in a Search Committee for hiring a new faculty in the Department of Economics.
PROFESSIONAL
AFFILIATIONS Member of the American Economic Association since 2015
Member of the American Statistical Association since 2015
Salfo Bikienga
REFERENCES
Page 3
Economics Department
Professor Mathew Cushing
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Email: mcushing1@unl.edu
Phone: (402) 472 - 2323
Professor Hendrik Van den Berg
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Email: hvan-den-berg1@unl.edu
Phone: (402) 202 - 6997
Statistics Department
Professor Kent Eskridge
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Email: keskridge1@unl.edu
Phone: (402) 472 - 7213
Professor Shunpu Zhang
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Email: szhang@unl.edu