Articles
Rural Electrification: The Potential and Limitations of Solar Power (Oxford Energy Forum, 2018) with Anna Aevarsdottir and Tessa Bold (here)
Work with C4ED
Impact Assessment of the Southern Punjab Poverty Alleiation Project (SPPAP) for IFAD Research and Impact Assessment department
Link to the full report
Link to the brief
Link to the Infographic
"Child Labour Analysis in Ethiopia" for UNICEF Ethiopia
Link to the report (nominated for Innocenti best of research 2020)
Link to brief
Impact evaluation of the rural land plans implemented by the GIZ implemented ProPFR programme in Benin for the World Bank and GIZ
Link to baseline data
Link to baseline report summary
Link to endline data
Link to endline impact evaluation report
Link to endline policy note
Child Labour Surveys in Pakistan
Link to main report in Gilgit Baltistan
Link to key findings report in Gilgit Baltistan
Link to infographics for Gilgit Baltistan
Link to main report in Punjab
Link to key findings report in Punjab
Link to main report in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Link to key findings report in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Link to key infographics in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Working Papers
Measuring Rents from Public Employment: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Kenya
joint work with Tessa Bold and Justin Sandefur
Abstract: Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar private sector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan government’s algorithm for hiring eighteen-thousand new teachers in 2010 in a regression discontinuity design. Fuzzy regression discontinuity estimates yield a civil-service wage premium of over 100 percent (not attributable to observed or unobserved skills), but no effect on motivation, suggesting rent-sharing as the most plausible explanation for the wage premium.
Work in Progress
Rural Electrification: The Potential and Limitations of Solar Power (Link to the IGC page)
Link to Pre-Analysis Plan registered at the AEA RCT Registry (here)
Solar energy and technology adoption: experimental evidence from Tanzania
joint work with Anna Aevarsdottir
The impacts of rural electrification on labor supply, income and health: experimental evidence with solar lamps in Tanzania
joint work with Anna Aevarsdottir and Tessa Bold
Abstract: Energy, in particular electricity, is a viewed as a key component to economic development but nearly 1.3 billion individuals have no access to electricity. Grid expansion cannot currently meet the demands of many of these, including 530 million people in, primarily rural, sub-Saharan Africa. We provide experimental evidence on the impacts of non-grid small scale electrification through the use of a large scale randomized control trial. We offer randomized subsidies to 30 randomly selected households in each of 60 schools towards a solar lamp with a mobile phone charging point. We find that the lamps positively affect not only immediate outcomes such as expenditure on lighting and mobile phone charging, but also intermediate results including labor supply as well as .final outcomes such as household income and well-being, effects that are robust even when controlling for multiple testing. Additionally, we .find significant positive treatment effects on health in the sub-sample of households that did not previously own a solar lamp.