Research on impacts of rural electrification, with a focus on households as beneficiaries
Are promotion programs needed to establish off-grid solar energy markets? Evidence from rural Burkina Faso (2018)
published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, with Michael Grimm, Max Huppertz and Jörg Langbein
Summary: Off-grid solar electric power is a promising technology for remote regions in rural Africa where expansion of the electricity grids is prohibitively expensive. Using household data from a target region of an off-grid solar promotion program in the Kénédougou province in Burkina Faso, this paper explores the role of quality-verified branded solar home systems (SHS) versus non-branded ones. We find that the adoption rate of non-branded SHS is considerably higher at 36% compared to 8% for branded SHS. We compare potential quality differences as well as the cost-effectiveness of branded and non-branded solar products. We show that non-branded SHSs offer a similar service level as branded solar, that they do not fall behind in terms of consumer satisfaction and durability, and that non-branded products are more cost-effective. These findings suggest that promotion programs and branded solar products do not seem to be necessary in Burkina Faso and might also not be needed to establish sustainable off-grid solar markets elsewhere provided that non-branded products are available. The challenge however is to reach the very poor who are unable to bring up investment costs for any electricity.
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A First Step up the Energy Ladder? Low Cost Solar Kits and Household’s Welfare in Rural Rwanda (2017)
published in the World Bank Economic Review, with Michael Grimm and Anicet Munyehirwe
Summary: More than 1.1 billion people in developing countries are lacking access to electricity. Based on the assumption that electricity is a prerequisite for human development, the United Nations has proclaimed the goal of providing electricity to all by 2030. In recent years, Pico-Photovoltaic kits have become a low-cost alternative to investment intensive grid electrification. Using a randomized controlled trial, we examine uptake and impacts of a simple Pico-Photovoltaic kit that barely exceeds the modern energy benchmark defined by the United Nations. We find significant positive effects on household energy expenditures and some indication for effects on health, domestic productivity, and on the environment. Since only parts of these effects are internalized, underinvestment into the technology is likely. In addition, our data show that adoption will be impeded by affordability, suggesting that policy would have to consider more direct promotion strategies such as subsidies or financing schemes to reach the UN goal.
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Impacts of Rural Electrification Revisited - The African Context (2016)
published in the Journal of Development Effectiveness
Summary: The investment requirements to achieve the United Nations’ universal electricity access goal by 2030 are estimated at 640 billion USD. The assumption underlying this goal is that electrification contributes to poverty alleviation in many regards. In recent years, a body of literature has emerged that widely confirms this positive poverty impact assumption. Most of these studies, however, are based on data from Asia and Latin America. This paper challenges the transferability of impact findings in the literature to the African context. Using a unique data set collected in various African countries, the paper suggests that impact expectations on income, education and health should be discounted considerably for Africa. In many cases, the low levels of electricity consumption can also be served by low-cost solar alternatives. To ensure cost-effective usage of public investments in rural electrification, we call for careful cost-benefit comparisons of on-grid and off-grid solutions.
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Television and Contraceptive Use - A Weak Signal? (2014)
published in the Journal of Development Studies, with Christoph Strupat and Colin Vance
Summary: In recent years, rural electrification and access to television have spread throughout the developing world. The values and cultural norms embodied in television programming have potentially profound implications for influencing behaviour, including reproductive decisions. After replicating Westoff and Koffman’s (2011) finding of a positive correlation between television ownership and contraception using pooled Indonesian data, we proceed to estimate a fixed-effects model. The coefficient on television loses its significance while other policy relevant variables retain theirs. We conclude that the growing corpus of cross-sectional evidence on a link between television and contraception should be interpreted cautiously.
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Fear of the Dark? How Access to Electric Lighting Affects Security Attitudes and Nighttime Activities in Rural Senegal (2013)
published in the Journal of Rural and Comunity Development
Summary: Providing access to electricity is widely considered a precondition for socio-economic improvement in rural areas of developing countries. While electrification interventions are often expected to reduce poverty through their application in income generating purposes (business), the reality of rural usage patterns suggests a different actuality, with electricity being used for lighting and entertainment devices only. It is particularly lighting, with its implications for security and convenience, which explains the importance assigned to electrification. This paper investigates the effects of Solar Home System (SHS) electricity usage on lighting consumption and activities after nightfall, applying cross-sectional household-level data from rural Senegal. We apply a new matching algorithm to control for a possible self-selection into SHS ownership and find substantially higher lighting usage and study time for school children after nightfall. We also find some indication for improvements in perceived security.
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Impacts of Rural Electrification in Rwanda (2011)
published in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, with Jochen Kluve
Summary: Rural electrification is believed to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. In this paper, we investigate electrification impacts on different indicators. We use household data that we collected in Rwanda in villages with and without electricity access. We account for self-selection and regional differences by using households from the electrified villages to estimate the probability to connect for all households – including those in the non-electrified villages. Based on these probabilities we identify counterfactual households and find robust evidence for positive effects on lighting usage. Effects on income and children’s home studying become insignificant if regional differences are accounted for.
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Rural Electrification and Fertility - Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire (2011)
published in the in Journal of Development Studies, with Colin Vance
Summary: Using household-level survey data from Côte d’Ivoire, this paper investigates the determinants of fertility with a particular focus on the effect of electrification. Based on a Poisson regression model, our analysis suggests a highly significant relationship between fertility and electricity, but one that is only revealed when the model distinguishes between rural and urban areas. Specifically, we find a positive association between electricity and fertility for urban households, contrasted by a negative relationship for rural households. This dichotomy is suggested to reflect the influences of electricity in facilitating child care, offset by its modernising impacts through the provision of information.
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Research on impacts of electrification, with a focus on productive use
Impacts of a Micro-Enterprise Clustering Program on Firm Performance in Ghana (2015)
published in the European Journal of Development Research, with Christoph Strupat
Summary: Widely considered an important backbone of economies in developing countries, micro- and small enterprises face several growth constraints. The creation of industrial zones (IZs) with improved access to infrastructure and secure land tenure is a potential remedy to promote local economic development. We assess the effects of an intervention on business performance indicators that establishes IZs for micro-enterprises in Ghana based on firm-level data on 227 enterprises. The results show that the establishment of IZs leads to the creation of new firms, but for existing firms that relocated to the IZs the effects on firm performance are negative.
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Impact Evaluation of Productive Use - An Implementation Guideline for Electrification Projects (2012)
published in Energy Policy, with Christoph Schmidt
Summary: There is a consensus in the international community that rural electrification and, in particular, the productive use of electricity contributes to poverty alleviation. At the same time, efforts to evaluate the impacts of development projects have increased substantially. This paper provides a hands-on guide for designing evaluation studies regarding the impacts of productive electricity usage. Complementary to the existing literature on evaluation methods, this guide familiarizes project managers with the concrete steps that have to be undertaken to plan and implement an evaluation. The guide comprises three modules based on enterprise surveys and on anecdotal case studies. For each module, the implementation is described on a step-by-step basis including conceptual issues as well as logistics and methodological questions.
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Grid Extension in Rural Benin: Micro-Manufacturers and the Electrification Trap (2011)
published in World Development, with Colin Vance and Marek Harsdorff
Summary: Productive electricity use is widely believed to contribute to positive impacts of electrification projects. This paper investigates these impacts by comparing the performance of micro manufacturing enterprises in grid-covered and non-covered villages in Northern Benin. Using firm-level data, the analysis employs Propensity Score Matching techniques to measure differences in profits according to a grid-connection. Although beneficial impacts are found from firm creation following electrification, firms that existed before electrification perform no better than their matched counterparts from a non-electrified region. Complementary measures that sensitize firms about the implications of a grid connection are recommended as important features of program design.
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Electricity Usage in Micro-enterprises - Evidence from Lake Victoria, Uganda (2011)
published in Energy for Sustainable Development, with Sven Neelsen
Summary: This paper aims to shed light on the nexus of electricity, firm performance, and economic development in a dynamic rural area in Southern Uganda. Using quantitative firm-level data on 200 micro-enterprises complemented by qualitative case studies we find that modern energy increases the importance of electricity-using capital and alters the sectoral distribution of economic activities. By contrast, we find no evidence for an expansionary effect of electrification on firm profits or worker remuneration. In fact, many entrepreneurs consider the direct gain from connecting to the grid to be small. Qualitative information, however, suggests that a positive indirect impact of electrification on firm performance is induced by the overall expansive effect electrification has on local demand. The demand increase can be partly assigned to people moving into the electrified community from surrounding non-electrified areas. We conclude that if productive energy promotion policies are put in place they should address drawing up thorough business plans to enable local entrepreneurs to take informed connection and investment decisions.
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Impacts of Electricity Usage on Micro-enterprises in Peri-urban Ghana (2011)
published in Journal of Social and Economic Policy, with Colin Vance
– available upon request –
Research on energy access infrastructure in more general terms
The forgotten coal: Charcoal demand in sub-Saharan Africa (2022)
published in World Development Perspectives (Special Issue on “The Future of Coal in the Global South”), with Julian Rose and Anicet Munyehirwe
Summary: Charcoal is an important cooking fuel in urban Africa. In this paper, we estimate the current number of charcoal users and project trends for the coming decades. Charcoal production is often not effectively regulated, and it hence contributes to forest degradation. Moreover, charcoal has adverse health effects for its users. At the same time, charcoal constitutes an important income source in deprived rural areas, while the current alternative, gas, is a mostly imported fossil fuel. We find that 195 million people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on charcoal as their primary cooking fuel and gauge that another 200 million use charcoal as secondary fuel. Our scenarios suggest that clean cooking initiatives are outweighed by strong urban population growth and hence charcoal usage is expected to remain high over the coming decades. Policies should therefore target end-users, forest management, and regulation of charcoal production to enable sustainable production and use of charcoal.
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Diesel GenSat: using satellite data to detect diesel-powered irrigation for guiding electrification in Ethiopia (2022)
published in e-Energy ’22: Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems, with June Lukuyu and Jay Taneja
Summary: In Sub-Saharan Africa, electricity access is progressing, but electricity use for economic growth remains stagnant. Powering economies sustainably is vital to enhancing livelihoods and is particularly challenging in agriculture-led rural economies. The financial viability of electrification hinges on identifying potential sources of demand to ensure sustainable revenues for utilities, which in turn provides economic benefits to consumers. This paper presents a technique for identifying areas with diesel-powered irrigation activity in Ethiopia based on remotely sensed data. We develop and evaluate a supervised classification model based on data collected in the Western Ethiopia Highlands on irrigation practices. We find that a feature-based multivariate time series classification approach combined with a k-Nearest Neighbors model accurately predicts about 75% of areas with diesel-powered irrigation activity. Our results suggest that our technique could be valuable in identifying areas in Ethiopia with potential anchor loads for electricity grid extension by replacing existing diesel pumps for irrigation with electric pumps. Guidance on financially-viable areas to expand electricity networks, especially those with economically-vibrant activities like irrigation, is crucial for enabling electricity service providers to recover costs and expand access to more communities more quickly.
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The market-based dissemination of energy-access technologies as a business model for rural entrepreneurs: Evidence from Kenya (2021)
published in Resource and Energy Economics, with Jochen Kluve and Jonathan Stöterau
Summary: Improving access to more modern forms of energy requires supply chains that reach further into rural areas. This paper studies a supply-side intervention intended to foster last-mile distribution of energy-access technologies through local small-scale entrepreneurship. We use a staggered-implementation evaluation design to assess the impact on employment and income outcomes of the intervention, which is a large-scale program in Kenya that supports the diffusion of improved cookstoves and small solar products. The results demonstrate how trained entrepreneurs intensify and diversify their income-generating activities, often by shifting away from subsistence farming as a main source of income. For cookstove entrepreneurs, this goes along with improvements in individual and household incomes as well as perceived economic well-being. Our estimates suggest that impacts do not only differ between the two technologies but also across subgroups including gender, age, and baseline occupation. Our findings substantiate that market-based interventions can foster energy access in rural areas by supporting the establishment of local businesses. We highlight several contextual factors that are of relevance when considering the adoption of this approach.
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Is Energy the Golden Thread? A Systematic Review of the Impacts of Modern and Traditional Energy Use in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (2021)
published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, with Marc Jeuland, Luciane Lenz, Erin Sills, Montserrat Serrano-Medrano, Remidius Ruhinduka, Ping Qin and Maria Angelica Naranjo
Summary: Energy has been called the “golden thread” that connects economic growth, social equity and environmental sustainability, but important knowledge gaps exist on the impacts of low- and middle-income country energy interventions and transitions. This study offers perhaps the broadest characterization to date of the patterns and consistency in quantitative and peer-reviewed social science literature considering such impacts. Starting from approximately 80,000 papers identified using a search procedure organized along energy services, technology, and impact dimensions, and structured to achieve breadth and replicability, articles were first screened to yield a relevant subset of 3,000 quantitative papers. Relevance is defined as providing one or more types of impacts on intra-household, household, firm, public service, national economy, or environmental outcomes. A set of heat maps highlights areas of concentration in the literature, namely work that emphasizes the negative health and pollution effects of traditional cooking and fossil fuel use. The extent and consistency of evidence for different types of impacts (in terms of direction and statistical significance) is also discussed, which reveals considerable heterogeneity and highlights important knowledge gaps that remain despite rapidly expanding energy scholarship. The patterns of evidence are also surprisingly consistent across methods. The article concludes by articulating several research challenges that should motivate current and future generations of energy and development scholars.
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Demand for Off-Grid Solar Electricity - Experimental Evidence from Rwanda (2020)
published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, with Michael Grimm and Luciane Lenz
Summary: High hopes are pinned on market-based dissemination of off-grid technologies to complement expensive grid extension in providing electricity to the nearly 1 billion unconnected people in developing countries. In this paper, we elicit the revealed willingness to pay for different solar technologies in rural Rwanda. Households are willing to dedicate substantial parts of their budget to electricity, but not enough to reach cost-covering prices. Randomly extended payment periods do not alter this finding. We interpret the results from two perspectives. First, we examine whether the United Nations’ universal energy access goal can be reached via unsubsidized markets. Second, in a stylized welfare analysis, we compare a subsidization policy for off-grid solar electrification to a grid extension policy. Our findings suggest that off-grid solar is the preferable technology to reach mass electrification in rural areas and that grid infrastructure should concentrate on selected regions with promising business prospects.
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Willingness to Pay for Electricity Access in Extreme Poverty: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (2020)
published in World Development, with Jevgenijs Stenbuks
Summary: Improving electricity access in low-income countries is complicated because of high service costs and low electricity consumption levels in rural areas. This study elucidates this problem by analyzing poor Sub-Saharan African households’ willingness-to-pay for different types of electricity access, including both grid and lower cost off-grid technologies. We show both theoretically and empirically that at low levels of income, low-cost decentralized off-grid solar technologies provide the highest utility from the households’ perspective. We, therefore, recommend concentrating the near-term rural household electrification efforts on these technologies.
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Rural Electrification through Mini-Grids: Challenges ahead (2019)
published in Energy Policy, with Michael Toman
Summary: Recent debates on how to provide electricity to the roughly one billion still unconnected people in developing countries have identified mini-grids as a promising way forward. High upfront costs of transmission lines are avoided, and unlike home-scale solar, mini-grids can provide sufficient electricity for productive uses. Indeed, mini-grids play a crucial role in accomplishing the goal of the UN Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) Initiative to provide universal access to electricity by 2030. This note outlines the challenges the mini-grid sector faces to achieve that potential. To date, few examples of sustainably working mini-grid programs exist. We identify regulatory issues, low electricity demand in rural areas, high payment default rates and over-optimistic demand projections as among the key challenges. Business models that account for high transaction costs in rural areas and that are based on realistic demand forecasts could considerably increase the commercial viability of mini-grids.
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The effects of market-based reforms on access to electricity in developing countries: a systematic review (2019)
published in the Journal of Development Effectiveness
Summary: Market-based reforms have been promoted over the past decades to improve the performance of the power sector. This systematic review assesses the effect of market-based reforms in developing countries on intermediate outcomes like technical efficiency and the resulting impacts on electricity access. Using a pool of 70 well-designed qualitative and quantitative studies, the review synthesizes impacts of private sector involvement, privatisation, liberalisation, and regulation. This mixed-methods approach detects only few and mostly weak effect patterns for reform types sufficiently evaluated in the primary literature. The qualitative synthesis further distils factors that likely contribute to successful electricity sector reforms as tentative guidance for coherent policy delivery.
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Successful coal phase-out requires new models of development (2019)
published in Nature Energy, with Matthias Kalkuhl, Jan Christoph Steckel, Lorenzo Montrone, Michael Jakob and Ottmar Edenhofer
Summary: Different energy sources have different spillovers on economic development and industrialization. Pathways of economic development based on renewable energy sources might require additional policies to support industrial development.
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A Methodological Framework to address Gaps in the Evidence on Infrastructure Impacts: The Case of an Indian Railway Project Evaluation (2019)
published in the Journal of Economic Methodology, with Sreeja Jaiswal
Summary: Infrastructure is a key area of public investment and development cooperation, and can be seen as a critical enabler of trade and integration. Stakeholders increasingly demand evidence on the effectiveness of investments in infrastructure such as railways, in part because these investments typically lock in development patterns for decades. In this article we take stock of the main findings, methodological approaches, gaps and caveats of the current literature with a focus on railways. Based on this analysis, we present a methodology for an impact evaluation framework which builds on existing knowledge and addresses some of these shortcomings. Beyond the dearth of empirical evidence on the socio-economic and environmental impacts of infrastructure, we discuss critiques of the currently prevalent methodological toolbox. Using a real-world railway project in India, the Konkan Railway, we exemplify how a rigorous quantitative impact assessment can integrate inter-disciplinary and mixed-methods features to address these issues. Specifically, we apply different quasi-experimental techniques on the level of intermediate and ultimate outcome and impact indicators, using census, survey and satellite data and information from document analyses, interviews and focus group discussions. We draw on insights from economics, sociology, engineering and geography in making sense of large infrastructure projects and their impacts.
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Does Large-Scale Infrastructure Investment Alleviate Poverty? Impacts of Rwanda’s Electricity Access Roll-Out Program (2017)
published in World Development, with Luciane Lenz and Anicet Munyehirwe
Summary: The objective of the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All initiative (SE4All) is to provide electricity by 2030 to the 1.1 billion people in developing countries that hitherto lack access. The OECD/IEA quantifies the investment requirements of this to be at 640 billion USD. Little evidence exists on socio-economic impacts of electrification. The present paper is the first to causally investigate the effects of electrification in Africa on all beneficiary groups. The electrification program under research, the Rwandan Electricity Access Role-Out Program (EARP), is one of the largest in the world. Our analysis is based on a panel of 974 households, a full-census survey among health centers, and qualitative surveys among 83 micro-enterprises and 50 schools. We find that EARP has been remarkably effective in increasing the connection numbers among all beneficiary types. Around 3.5 years after electrification, the quantity of consumed electricity and the uptake of appliances, though, remain low. Noteworthy impacts are decreasing energy expenditures and a considerable reduction in dry-cell battery consumption with potential environmental benefits. Beyond this, electricity mostly facilitates people’s life, but there is only weak evidence for impacts on classical poverty indicators such as income, health, and education. We conclude by calling for more research on the comparison of on-grid and off-grid electrification with respect to impact potentials, costs, and people’s willingness to pay in order to inform the way forward within the SE4All endeavor.
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The Lighting Transition in Rural Africa - From Kerosene to Battery-powered LED and the Emerging Disposal Problem (2017)
published in Energy for Sustainable Development
Summary: People without electricity access, numbering today more than 500 million in rural Africa alone, have been using dim and sooty kerosene lamps and candles for their lighting purposes for decades. In the present paper, current lighting usage patterns are systematically assessed using detailed new survey data from seven countries across Sub-Saharan Africa. The data makes evident that a transition has taken place in recent years, both unnoticed by and without external support from governmental or non-governmental organizations: the rural population without electricity in Africa has replaced kerosene lights and candles by simple, yet more efficient and cleaner LED lamps powered by non-rechargeable batteries. Nevertheless, we also show that the discharged batteries are generally disposed of inappropriately in latrines or the nature. The toxic content of many dry-cell batteries and their accumulation at local litter hotspots may have harmful repercussions on health and the environment. We conclude by suggesting that rapid action is needed to, first, install an effective monitoring system on batteries that enter the continent and, second, put in place an appropriate waste management system.
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Infrastructure and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa - A Review (2017)
published in the Journal of Development Studies
Summary: This paper reviews the book “Infrastructure and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa” by Antonio Estache and Quentin Wodon. The authors summarize the political debate on infrastructure policy in Africa in a very compelling and knowledgeable way and make a convincing case for pro-poor subsidies. Yet, this review points out two reservations: The evidence on the welfare enhancing benefits of infrastructure investments is less conclusive than suggested in the book. The book also misses out on the recent technological developments that enable the provision of decentralized services, which might render classical network based infrastructure partly redundant in the future.
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Solar off-grid markets in Africa - Recent dynamics and the role of branded products (2016)
published in Fields Actions Science Reports (FACTS), with Michael Grimm
Summary: The UN electricity for all initiative promotes branded solar products based on the argument that otherwise households won’t have access to such technologies. We argue that nonbranded products have already reached households; hence access is not an issue, at least for richer households. Yet, a justifi cation of branded products can be made based on their durability and thus reduced electronic waste. Subsidies can be paid to reach also the poor.
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Evaluating Rural Electrification Projects: Methodological Approaches (2009)
published in Well-Being and Social Policy
Summary: In recent years, the international community has expanded efforts in program evaluation to improve the accountability of development projects. This paper presents approaches to implementing state of the art evaluations in rural electrification projects, taking into account specific challenges that researchers face in such interventions. It suggests an approach to assess impacts before an intervention is implemented by surveying the yet non-electrified target region of the project and, in addition, an already electrified region. Besides delivering robust evidence on impacts, results from such ex-ante evaluations deliver insights for the project design, thereby reducing the gap between evaluation researchers and practitioners.
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Rural Electrification: Accelerating Impacts with Complementary Services (2009)
published in Energy for Sustainable Development, with Marek Harsdorff and Florian Ziegler
Summary: It is commonly recognized among rural energy experts and development practitioners that electrification activities in rural areas of developing countries should be accompanied by complementary services. Nevertheless, rural electrification projects that confine themselves to hardware financing and civil works without undertaking escorting activities are observed frequently. This paper highlights the necessity of complementary services such as sensitisation campaigns or business development services by reporting experiences gained during the preparation of a grid based electrification project in rural Benin. One intriguing result is that the target group – be it households, enterprises, or social institutions – is frequently not aware of the economic potentials of electricity and hence cannot be expected to consider the grid connection decision and the usage of electricity rationally in an economic sense. It is concluded that responsibility for complementary services should be in principle with the grid operator, while the government or regulatory bodies have to assure welfare orientation of the services.
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Research on improved cooking stoves
Releasing the killer from the kitchen? Ventilation and air pollution from biomass cooking (2023)
published in Development Engineering, with Luciane Lenz, Ryan Chartier, Moustapha Kane, and Marc Jeuland
Summary: Household air pollution from biomass cooking is the most significant environmental health risk in the Global South. Interventions to address this risk mostly promote less-polluting stoves and clean fuels, but their diffusion has proven difficult. This paper assesses the potentially complementary role of ventilation in reducing household air pollution. Using state-of-the-art measurements of kitchen concentrations of particulate matter (PM2.5) and personal exposure from around 250 households in rural Senegal, we show that higher ventilation is strongly related to lower kitchen concentration, though absolute pollution levels remain high. This association is robust to controlling for a comprehensive set of potential confounders. Yet, these reductions in concentration do not clearly translate into lower pollution exposure among cooks, probably due to avoidance behaviour. Our findings indicate that ventilation interventions may reduce smoke concentration nearly as much as many real-world clean stove interventions and can hence be an important complement to existing strategies. However, a more holistic approach is needed in order to reduce personal exposure in line with international health standards.
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Efficient biomass cooking in Africa for climate change mitigation and development (2021)
published in One Earth with Marc Jeuland
Summary: More than 2.7 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass for cooking with profound implications for their well-being. Two million people die every year due to cooking related smoke emissions – more than are killed by malaria. In recent years, an international movement has gained momentum on the level of the United Nations that intends to combat this plight by the dissemination of improved cooking stoves. A recent study conducted by Hanna, Duflo and Greenstone based on a field experiment in India has attracted much attention, also in the popular press. It does not confirm the optimistic results on the impacts of improved cooking stoves that hitherto can be found in the literature. Editorial notes in newspapers like the New York Times took up findings from the study and vehemently criticized the international efforts to improve access to cleaner cooking fuels as ineffective. The present RWI Positionen policy paper argues that this journalistic verdict is premature and that the results of the study are overstressed. While the study is in principle a meaningful contribution to the improved stoves literature, its findings are very specific to the local environment in which it was conducted and as we argue the insights can barely be transferred to other areas in the developing world.
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One‐Off Subsidies and Long‐Run Adoption—Experimental Evidence on Improved Cooking Stoves in Senegal (2020)
published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics
Summary: Free technology distribution can be an effective development policy instrument if market‐driven adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Yet, policy makers often oppose free distribution, arguing that reference dependence lowers the willingness to pay (WTP) and thus hinders market potentials in the long run. For improved cookstoves, this paper studies the WTP six years after a randomized one‐time free distribution in 2009. We demonstrate that the cookstoves were intensely used by the treatment group households in the years after randomization until they reached their designated lifetime. Using a real‐purchase offer, we find that both treatment and control households reveal a remarkably high WTP in 2015. The estimated confidence interval suggests that we can exclude a substantial negative effect on the treatment group. The policy implication is that one‐time free distribution does not necessarily undermine future market establishment, and thus can be an effective policy instrument if rapid dissemination is the objective.
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Enablers of Strong Cookstove Sales through a Purchase Offer Approach in Rural Senegal - An Explorative Analysis (2017)
published in Boiling Point
Summary: This article outlines the main results of a study in rural Senegal where households were invited to purchase simple improved biomass cookstoves in their villages. Households’ stove purchases and willingness to pay levels turned out to be unexpectedly high considering that the stoves are generally available in the area and at least part of the study sample households were already exposed to the specific stove type before. We therefore conducted an explorative analysis of potential factors that may have triggered the high degree of sales. In particular, aspects of the applied mode of stove delivery and the specific interview situation are assessed. This serves to derive insights into potential intervention design and communication approaches for entry-level improved stoves, which are likely transferable to higher-tier modern energy access technologies as well.
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Outdoor cooking prevalence in developing countries and its implication for clean cooking policies (2017)
published in Environmental Research Letters, with Jörg Langbein
Summary: More than 3 billion people use wood fuels for their daily cooking needs, with detrimental health implications related to smoke emissions. Best practice global initiatives emphasize the dissemination of clean cooking stoves, but these are often expensive and suffer from interrupted supply chains that do not reach rural areas. This emphasis neglects that many households in the developing world cook outdoors. Our calculations suggest that for such households, the use of less expensive biomass cooking stoves can substantially reduce smoke exposure. The cost-effectiveness of clean cooking policies can thus be improved by taking cooking location and ventilation into account.
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The Intensive Margin of Technology Adoption – Experimental Evidence on Improved Cooking Stoves in Rural Senegal (2015)
published in the Journal of Health Economics
Summary: Today, almost 3 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass as primary cooking fuel, with profound negative implications for their well-being. Improved biomass cooking stoves are alleged to counteract these adverse effects. This paper evaluates take-up and impacts of low-cost improved stoves through a randomized controlled trial. The randomized stove is primarily designed to curb firewood consumption, but not smoke emissions. Nonetheless, we find considerable effects not only on firewood consumption, but also on smoke exposure and, consequently, smoke-related disease symptoms. The reduced smoke exposure results from behavioural changes in terms of increased outside cooking and a reduction in cooking time. We conclude that in order to assess the effectiveness of a technology-oriented intervention, it is critical to not only account for the incidence of technology adoption – the extensive margin – but also for the way the new technology is used – the intensive margin.
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Why Do Households Forego High Returns from Technology Adoption? Evidence from Improved Cook Stoves in Burkina Faso (2015)
published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, with Michael Grimm
Summary: Around 3 billion people in developing countries rely on woodfuels for their daily cooking needs with profound negative implications for their workload, health, and budget as well as the environment. Improved cooking stove (ICS) technologies appear to be an obvious solution in many cases. In spite of great efforts made by the international community to disseminate ICSs, take-up rates in most developing countries are strikingly low. In this paper, we examine the reasons for (non-)adoption of a very simple ICS in urban Burkina Faso. As a first result, we find that ICS users need between 20 and 30 percent less firewood compared to traditional stoves, making the investment a very profitable one. Nonetheless, adoption rates are a mere 10 percent. The major deterrent to adoption is the upfront investment costs, which are much more important than access to information, taste preferences, or the woman’s role in the household. These findings suggest that more direct promotion strategies such as subsidies would help households to overcome liquidity constraints, and would hence improve adoption rates.
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Alleviating Deforestation Pressures? Impacts of Improved Stove Dissemination on Charcoal Consumption in Urban Senegal (2013)
published in Land Economics
Summary: With 2.7 billion people relying on woodfuel for cooking in developing countries, the dissemination of improved cooking stoves (ICSs) is frequently considered an effective instrument to combat deforestation, particularly in arid countries. This paper evaluates the impacts of an ICS dissemination project in urban Senegal on charcoal consumption, using data collected among 624 households. The virtue of our data is that it allows for rigorously estimating charcoal savings by accounting for both household characteristics and meal-specific cooking patterns. We find average savings of 25% per dish. In total, the intervention reduces Senegalese charcoal consumption by around 1%.
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Improved Cooking Stoves that End up in Smoke? (2012)
published as RWI Position, with Michael Grimm
Summary: More than 2.7 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass for cooking with profound implications for their well-being. Two million people die every year due to cooking related smoke emissions – more than are killed by malaria. In recent years, an international movement has gained momentum on the level of the United Nations that intends to combat this plight by the dissemination of improved cooking stoves. A recent study conducted by Hanna, Duflo and Greenstone based on a field experiment in India has attracted much attention, also in the popular press. It does not confirm the optimistic results on the impacts of improved cooking stoves that hitherto can be found in the literature. Editorial notes in newspapers like the New York Times took up findings from the study and vehemently criticized the international efforts to improve access to cleaner cooking fuels as ineffective. The present RWI Positionen policy paper argues that this journalistic verdict is premature and that the results of the study are overstressed. While the study is in principle a meaningful contribution to the improved stoves literature, its findings are very specific to the local environment in which it was conducted and as we argue the insights can barely be transferred to other areas in the developing world.
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Further research
Do economists replicate? (2023)
published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, with Nathan Fiala and Florian Neubauer
Summary: Reanalyses of empirical studies and replications in new contexts are important for scientific progress. Journals in economics increasingly require authors to provide data and code alongside published papers, but how much does the economics profession actually replicate? This paper summarizes existing replication definitions and reviews how much economists replicate other scholars’ work. We argue that in order to counter incentive problems potentially leading to a replication crisis, replications in the spirit of Merton’s ‘organized skepticism’ are needed – what we call ‘policing replications’. We review leading economics journals to show that policing replications are rare and conclude that more incentives to replicate are needed to reap the fruits of rising transparency standards.
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Weather Information for Smallholders: Evidence from a Pilot Field Experiment in Benin (2023)
published in World Development, with Rosaine Yegbemey and Colin Vance
Summary: Weather conditions are an important determinant of agricultural factor input, particularly labor allocation. The availability of weather forecasts can therefore lead to efficiency gains in the form of cost decreases and productivity increases. We test the practical feasibility, the uptake, and the effect of providing basic weather forecasts in the rainy season on the labor productivity of smallholder farmers. For this purpose, we conducted a Randomized Controlled Trial as a pilot with monthly data collections involving 331 farmers across six villages in northern Benin. We find that most farmers subscribe to the intervention and report satisfaction with the service. The impact estimates indicate positive and economically significant intention-to-treat and local average treatment effects in terms of reduced relative labor costs, increased yield and, in turn, increased labor productivity for maize and cotton cultivation. These benefits come at relatively low cost, suggesting that weather-related information via mobile phone outreach holds promise for helping smallholder farmers to better adapt to changing weather.
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Weather and crime: Cautious evidence from South Africa (2023)
published in Q Open, with Anna Brüderle and Gareth Roberts
Summary: South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world. This paper examines the effect of weather shocks on various types of crime. Using a 12-year panel data set at monthly resolution on the police ward level, we observe a short-term effect of temperatures on violent crime. Furthermore, we find evidence for medium-term effect of weather on crime via droughts. Yet, effect sizes are subtle in both cases and we also emphasize often neglected but well-documented limitations to the interpretability of weather data and weather-induced mechanisms. Recognizing these limitations, we conclude with a cautious interpretation of our findings to inform police deployment strategies.
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Information Campaigns for Residential Energy Conservation (2022)
published in European Economic Review, with Mark Andor and Andreas Gerster
Summary: This paper evaluates an intervention that randomized information letters about energy efficient investments and behaviors among 120,000 customers of two utilities in Germany. We find that conservation effects differ considerably between both utilities, ranging from a precisely estimated zero effect to -1.4%. By contrast, we do not detect significant framing effects from presenting savings in monetary or ecological terms. Based on random causal forest methods, we show that the effect heterogeneity across utilities cannot be explained by socio-demographic characteristics. Our results demonstrate the importance of site-specific factors for the effectiveness of information campaigns, which has crucial implications for targeting and the ability to infer population-wide effect sizes from pilot studies.
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Social norms and energy conservation beyond the US (2020)
published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, with Mark Andor, Andreas Gerster and Christoph Schmidt
Summary: The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) show that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective climate policy intervention in the US. Our paper demonstrates the context-dependency of this result. In most industrialized countries, average electricity consumption and carbon intensity are well below US levels. Consequently, HER interventions can only become cost-effective if treatment effect sizes are substantially higher. For Germany, we provide evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial that effect sizes are in fact considerably lower than in the US. We conclude by illustrating that targeting highly responsive subgroups is crucial to reach cost-effectiveness and by identifying the few countries in which HER are promising policy instruments.
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Per Stups zum Energiesparen? Eine Meta-Analyse zu den kausalen Effekten von verhaltensökonomischen Interventionen auf den Energieverbrauch von privaten Haushalten (2019)
published in Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, with Mark Andor, Katja Fels and Nadine Kneppel
Summary: Zahlreiche Länder und Staatengemeinschaften in aller Welt haben sich verpflichtet, ihren Energieverbrauch drastisch zu senken. Wie dies geschehen soll, ist bislang jedoch eine offene Frage. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersuchen die Autoren in einer Meta-Analyse, welche Potenziale verhaltensökonomische Interventionen haben, den Energieverbrauch von privaten Haushalten zu reduzieren. Konkret geht es um vier verhaltensökonomische Interventionen, genannt Feedback, Sozialer Vergleich, Selbstbindung sowie Labeling. Die Meta-Analyse fußt dabei auf insgesamt 83 Artikeln, die über eine systematische Suche identifiziert wurden. Diese Studien legen nahe, dass Feedback, Sozialer Vergleich sowie Selbstbindung den Stromverbrauch privater Haushalte im Durchschnitt um 2 bis 4 Prozent reduzieren. Für das Labeling erlauben die vorliegenden Studien bislang keine Berechnung des zu erwartenden Durchschnittseffektes, doch es kann ein effektives Instrument darstellen. Vor einer flächendeckenden Einführung von als kosteneffizient eingeschätzten Maßnahmen zum Energiesparen empfehlen die Autoren eine systematische Ex-ante-Evaluation in der jeweiligen Zielregion.
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Generalization in the Tropics - Development Policy, Randomized Controlled Trials, and External Validity (2018)
published in the World Bank Research Observer, with Jörg Langbein and Gareth Roberts
Summary: When properly implemented, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) achieve a high degree of internal validity. Yet, if an RCT is to inform policy, it is critical to establish external validity. This paper systematically reviews all RCTs conducted in developing countries and published in leading economic journals between 2009 and 2014 with respect to how they deal with external validity. Following Duflo, Glennerster, and Kremer (2008), we scrutinize the following hazards to external validity: Hawthorne effects, general equilibrium effects, specific sample problems, and special care in treatment provision. Based on a set of objective indicators, we find that the majority of published RCTs does not discuss these hazards and many do not provide the necessary information to assess potential problems. The paper calls for including external validity dimensions in a more systematic reporting on the results of RCTs. This may create incentives to avoid overgeneralizing findings and help policy makers to interpret results appropriately.
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Accidents caused by kerosene lamps - New evidence from African household data (2018)
published in WIREs Energy and Environment, with Luciane Lenz and Laura Montenbruck
Summary: The use of kerosene for lighting, cooking, and heating in developing countries is often considered a major health threat as it can cause accidents like thermal injuries, poisonings, fires, or explosions. The evidence to prove this is extremely scarce, though. The present paper is one of the first to investigate the link between kerosene‐based lighting and accidents at the household level. We use survey data from 3,326 nonelectrified households in Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Senegal, and Zambia and observe very heterogeneous kerosene lamp usage rates. In some regions, accidents with kerosene lamps occur in a substantial share of the population, but the absolute incidence is rather low.
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Policy evaluation, randomized controlled trials, and external validity - A systematic review (2016)
published in Economics Letters, with Jörg Langbein and Gareth Roberts
Summary: This paper reviews all Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) published in leading economic journals between 2009 and 2014 with respect to how they deal with potential hazards to external validity: Hawthorne and John-Henry effects, general equilibrium effects, specific sample problems, and special care in treatment provision. We find that the majority of published RCTs does not discuss these hazards and many do not provide the necessary information to assess potential problems.
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Preferences over Bank and Family Loans in Rural Rwanda (2016)
published in the Journal of International Development, with Anne Schoofs
Summary: We study borrowers’ preferences over bank and family loans based on field work undertaken in rural Rwanda. We randomly assigned willingness-to-pay questions for a hypothetical loan offer either by a bank or by a family member to a sample of 480 households. Informal family loans are typically easier to access. Because of the social costs they imply, it is widely believed that family finance is less attractive than formal finance. Our empirical results, however, show no significant difference in preferences over these two choices. This suggests that even if formal credits were widely accessible, people would still also utilize informal finance.
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Von Staaten, Märkten und Subventionen - Paradigmenwechsel in der Armutsbekämpfung? (2015)
published in List Forum für Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik
Summary: Dieses Papier beleuchtet die Diskussion um Gestaltung und Wirksamkeit der bisherigen Entwicklungspolitik und liefert einen Ausblick für ihre Zukunft. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit erhält dabei die Rolle des Marktes in der Armutsbekämpfung auf der einen Seite und die des Staates und öffentlicher Subventionen auf der anderen. Am aktuellen Rand verläuft die Demarkationslinie in der entwicklungspolitischen Diskussion entlang der klassischen Lager von angebots- und nachfrageseitiger Wirtschaftspolitik. Während die eine Seite für massive Subventionen zur Armutsreduktion wirbt, sieht die andere darin eher die Ursache für verzerrende Effekte und schlägt die Bildung von Institutionen vor, die insbesondere marktwirtschaftliche Aktivitäten ermöglichen. Jenseits dieser zum Teil sehr ideologischen Debatte schließt sich dieses Papier dem sogenannten Dritten Weg an und argumentiert für ein neues Paradigma in der Armutsbekämpfung: Die wirksamsten Ansätze sollen durch evidenzbasierte wissenschaftliche Begleitung identifiziert und dann ausgeweitet werden. Am Ende eines solchen Paradigmenwechsels würde im Idealfall eine neue Form der erfolgsbasierten Konditionalität stehen.
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