Adrian Poignant

Publications

The Effects of Electricity on Female Employment: Evidence from Tajikistan's Winter Energy Crisis (Journal of Development Economics, 2025)

This paper studies the impact of electricity rationing on female employment during Tajikistan’s winter energy crisis, 2009–2015. Reduced access to electricity led to a decline in female employment as women left the workforce to become homemakers. The negative employment effect is specific to women and does not appear to be driven by changes in labor demand, involuntary unemployment, labor migration or fertility patterns. However, the decline in female employment is accompanied by a lower adoption of labor-saving electrical appliances. These findings suggest that electricity provision releases women from unpaid domestic work. Furthermore, they suggest that the quality of the electricity supply is vital for realizing the full benefits of electrification in developing countries.

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Small-scale mining and agriculture: Evidence from northwestern Tanzania (Resources Policy, 2023)

The rapid expansion of small-scale mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa has raised significant concerns about its impact on the local economy. While ASM has the potential to raise incomes and mobilize investments, ultimately benefiting existing agricultural activities and livelihoods, it may also have adverse effects on local farming communities. This paper examines the impact of small-scale gold mining on the agricultural production decisions of 965 rural households in northwestern Tanzania between 2008 and 2012. Contrary to the expectation of positive investment spillovers from ASM to smallholder agriculture, I find that farmer households tend to allocate fewer resources to agriculture and produce less output when small-scale gold mining sites emerge nearby. However, I also find suggestive evidence that exposure to small-scale gold mining leads to an increase in household consumption, while producing no evidence of adverse schooling or child health effects. This implies that small-scale mining can play an important role in alleviating rural poverty in the short- to medium-run.

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Working Papers

The Effects of Worker Displacement During the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from Sweden (with Raoul van Maarseveen and Niklas Bengtsson).  

We study the consequences of worker displacement during the second industrial revolution using novel archival data on the 19th-century Swedish iron industry combined with linked census data. Ironworkers displaced by the industrial transformation exited the iron industry at higher rates, were more likely to migrate internally, and ended up in occupations that paid on average 10% less compared to non-displaced workers. While the displacement effects persist over time for workers, we find no evidence of spillovers on their children. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to quantify the effects of worker displacement during the second industrial revolution.

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Tilting at Windmills: Experimental Evidence on Momentum and Hot Hands

Successes and failures often appear to propagate. According to one common belief, the experience of winning or losing can alter the cognitive and emotional state of performers, generating a psychological momentum that helps or harms subsequent performance. This belief is often used to rationalize the so-called hot-hand phenomenon, and has been applied to contexts ranging from horseshoe pitching to stock market trading. However, little evidence exists on the causal effect of winning on subsequent performance. I test whether wins cause more wins (and losses more losses) using a large natural experiment involving almost a quarter billion online chess games. I find that performance is serially correlated, indicating the existence of hot hands. Surprisingly, however, I find no evidence of causal effects. Players that were given a small random advantage in one game have no advantage in the next. The null effect is precisely estimated, providing credible evidence against the hypothesis that success breeds success.

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