Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification

Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, and Catherine Wolfram
2020
African DevelopmentEnvironment and ClimateResearch Methodology
REPP 2019-04-25-FINAL-All.pdf
We present results from an experiment that randomized the expansion of electric grid infrastructure in rural Kenya. Electricity distribution is a canonical example of a natural monopoly. Experimental variation in the number of connections, combined with administrative cost data, reveals considerable scale economies, as hypothesized. Randomized price offers indicate that demand for connections falls sharply with price. Among newly connected households, average electricity consumption is very low, implying low consumer surplus. We do not find meaningful medium-run impacts on economic and noneconomic outcomes. We discuss implications for current efforts to increase rural electrification in Kenya and highlight how various factors may affect interpretation.

Impacts and Determinants of Health Levels in Low-Income Countries

Pascaline Dupas, Edward Miguel
2017
African DevelopmentHealthEducation and Human CapitalResearch Methodology
1-s2.0-S2214658X16300113-main.pdf

Dupas, Pascaline, and Edward Miguel. "Impacts and Determinants of Health Levels in Low-Income Countries", 2017, Handbook of Field Experiments, (eds.) Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

Improved health in low-income countries could considerably improve wellbeing and possibly promote economic growth. The last decade has seen a surge in field experiments designed to understand the barriers that households and governments face in investing in health and how these barriers can be overcome, and to assess the impacts of subsequent health gains. This chapter first discusses the methodological pitfalls that field experiments in the health sector are particularly susceptible to, then reviews the evidence that rigorous field experiments have generated so far. While the link from in utero and child health to later outcomes has increasingly been established, few experiments have estimated the impacts of health on contemporaneous productivity among adults, and few experiments have explored the potential for infrastructural programs to impact health outcomes. Many more studies have examined the determinants of individual health behavior, on the side of consumers as well as among providers of health products and services.

Willingness to pay for cleaner water in less developed countries: systematic review of experimental evidence

Clair Null, Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel, Jorge Garcia Hombrados, Robyn Meeks, and Alix Petersen Zwane
2012
Environment and ClimateHealthEducation and Human CapitalResearch Methodology
SR006.pdf
Diarrheal diseases kill two million children every year despite the availability of effective and inexpensive technologies to improve water quality and limit the spread of pathogens. There is a growing literature on the effectiveness of such technologies but important gaps remain in understanding the demand for these products and the adoption decision. This review expands upon and complements several existing summary articles by focusing on willingness to pay for cleaner water. Willingness to pay can be measured by price randomizations that induce people to reveal their valuation in real purchase decisions or by other methods such as contingent valuation exercises in hypothetical situations and discrete choice analysis. The review conducts a systematic search for experimental evidence on willingness to pay for cleaner water.

Methodologies to Evaluate Early Childhood Development Programs

Jere Behrman, Paul Glewwe and Edward Miguel
2007
HealthEducation and Human CapitalResearch Methodology
Doing ie series 09.pdf
This chapter is devoted to discussions of how assessments of early childhood development (ECD) interventions in developing countries can be improved and extended. There are estimates that ECD problems are widespread in developing countries, increasing evidence that what happens in early childhood affects significantly options and productivities over the life cycles but very little systematic evidence to support that the impacts of these ECD programs are large or, more importantly, that the benefit-to-cost ratios of ECD interventions are high – particularly in light of the heterogeneous market, policy, and cultural contexts across developing countries that may limit the transferability of inferences from one context to another. Therefore the returns are potentially great not only for those who already are persuaded that more resources should be devoted to EDC interventions in developing countries in order that they can make their case more persuasively but also for those who are concerned more broadly about prioritizing resource allocations across what might seem to be a number of strong but difficult-to-compare alternatives ranging from other human resource investments to physical infrastructure investments to policies that affect markets such as for international goods and services and labor and capital flows, to have more systematic evaluations of the impacts of ECD interventions and of their benefit-to-cost ratios. 

Ethnically biased? Experimental Evidence from Kenya

Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Simon Galle, Edward Miguel, Daniel Posner, Bertil Tungodden and Kelly Zhang
2019
African DevelopmentPolitical Economy and Conflict
Ethnically biased JEEA2019.pdf
Ethnicity has been shown to shape political, social, and economic behavior in Africa, but the underlying mechanisms remain contested. We utilize lab experiments to isolate one mechanism—an individual’s bias in favor of coethnics and against non-coethnics—that has been central in both theory and in the conventional wisdom about the impact of ethnicity. We employ an unusually rich research design involving a large sample of 1300 participants from Nairobi, Kenya; the collection of multiple rounds of experimental data with varying proximity to national elections; within-lab priming conditions; both standard and novel experimental measures of coethnic bias; and an implicit association test (IAT). We find very little evidence of an ethnic bias in the behavioral games, which runs against the common presumption of extensive coethnic bias among ordinary Africans and suggests that mechanisms other than a coethnic bias in preferences must account for the associations we see in the region between ethnicity and political, social, and economic outcomes.

The case for mass treatment of intestinal helminths in endemic areas

Joan Hamory Hicks, Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel
2015
African DevelopmentHealthEducation and Human CapitalResearch Methodology
journal.pntd .0004214.pdf
Two articles published earlier this year in the International Journal of Epidemiology have re-ignited the debate over the World Health Organization’s long-held recommendation of mass-treatment of intestinal helminths in endemic areas. In this note, we discuss the content and relevance of these articles to the policy debate, and review the broader research literature on the educational and economic impacts of deworming. We conclude that existing evidence still indicates that mass deworming is a cost-effective health investment for governments in low-income countries where worm infections are widespread.

Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production

Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang, and Edward Miguel
2015
African DevelopmentEnvironment and Climate
BurkeHsiangMiguel2015.pdf

We show that overall economic productivity is nonlinear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 C and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries, with important implications. If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change.

War and Deforestation in Sierra Leone

Robin Burgess, Edward Miguel, and Charlotte Stanton
2015
African DevelopmentEnvironment and ClimatePolitical Economy and Conflict
ERL-published-pdf 2015-09.pdf

The impact of armed conflict on the environment is of major public policy importance. We use a geographically disaggregated dataset of civil war violence together with satellite imagery of land cover to test whether war facilitated or prevented forest loss in Sierra Leone. The conflict data set allows us to establish where rebel groups were stationed and where battles and attacks occurred. The satellite data enables to us to monitor the change in forest cover (total, primary, and secondary) in all of Sierra Leone's 151 chiefdoms, between 1990 (prior to the war) and 2000 (just prior to its end). The results suggest that conflict in Sierra Leone acted as a brake on local deforestation: conflict-ridden areas experienced significantly less forest loss relative to their more conflict-free counterparts.

Worms at work: Long-run impacts of a child health investment

Sarah Baird, Joan Hamory Hicks, Michael Kremer, and Edward Miguel
2016
African DevelopmentHealthEducation and Human CapitalResearch Methodology
Worms-at-Work 2016-07-12 FINAL CLEAN.pdf

This study estimates long-run impacts of a child health investment, exploiting community-wide experimental variation in school-based deworming. The program increased labor supply among men and education among women, with accompanying shifts in labor market specialization. Ten years after deworming treatment, men who were eligible as boys stay enrolled for more years of primary school, work 17% more hours each week, spend more time in non-agricultural self-employment, are more likely to hold manufacturing jobs, and miss one fewer meal per week. Women who were in treatment schools as girls are approximately one quarter more likely to have attended secondary school, halving the gender gap. They reallocate time from traditional agriculture into cash crops and non-agricultural self-employment. We estimate a conservative annualized financial internal rate of return to deworming of 32%, and show that mass deworming may generate more in future government revenue than it costs in subsidies.

Commentary: Deworming externalities and schooling impacts in Kenya: a comment on Aiken et al. (2015) and Davey et al. (2015)

Joan Hamory Hicks, Michael Kremer, and Edward Miguel
2015
African DevelopmentHealthEducation and Human CapitalResearch Methodology
Int. J. Epidemiol.-2015-Hicks-ije-dyv129.pdf

Aiken et al. (2015) and Davey et al (2015) draw the conclusion that the evidence for a relationship between deworming and school attendance is “weak” based on two fundamental errors in their data analysis. First, the authors redefine treatment to include pre-treatment control periods. Second, while the original research design was based on a stepped-wedge analysis that was adequately powered, the re-analysis authors undertake a clearly under-powered alternative analysis which ignores the time series element of the data, and then splits the cross-sectional analysis into two separate components, each of which has inadequate power. Examining the fully powered analysis, they report that in a fully-adjusted logistic regression model making maximum use of the data available, there is strong evidence of an improvement in school attendance.  If either error is corrected, deworming significantly increases school attendance under the full range of statistical analyses considered by Davey et al. Their analysis also underestimates the impact of deworming on school attendance by neglecting violations of the SUTVA assumption generated by transmission of worm infection to nearby schools (as in Miguel and Kremer 2004).

When Should Governments Subsidize Health? The Case of Mass Deworming

Amrita Ahuja, Sarah Baird, Joan Hamory Hicks, Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel, and Shawn Powers
2015
African DevelopmentHealthEducation and Human Capital
WBER When Should Govts Subsidize Health.pdf
We discuss how evidence and theory can be combined to provide insight on the appropriate subsidy level for health products, focusing on the specific case of deworming. Although intestinal worm infections can be treated using safe, low-cost drugs, some have challenged the view that mass school-based deworming should be a policy priority. We review well-identified research which both uses experimental or quasiexperimental methods to demonstrate causal relationships and adequately accounts for epidemiological externalities from deworming treatment, including studies of deworming campaigns in the Southern United States, Kenya, and Uganda. The existing evidence shows consistent positive impacts on school participation in the short run and on academic test scores, employment, and income in the long run, while suggesting that most parents will not pay for deworming treatment that is not fully subsidized. There is also evidence for a fiscal externality through higher future tax revenue, which may exceed the cost of the program. Our analysis suggests that the economic benefits of school-based deworming programs are likely to exceed their costs in places where worm infestations are endemic. This would likely be the case even if the benefits were only a fraction of estimates in the existing literature.

Promoting an Open Research Culture

B. A. Nosek, G. Alter, G. C. Banks, D. Borsboom, S. D. Bowman, S. J. Breckler, S. Buck, C. D. Chambers, G. Chin, G. Christensen, M. Contestabile, A. Dafoe, E. Eich, J. Freese, R. Glennerster, D. Goroff, D. P. Green, B. Hesse, M. Humphreys, J. Ishiyama, D. Karlan, A. Kraut, A. Lupia, P. Mabry, T. A. Madon, N. Malhotra, E. Mayo-Wilson, M. McNutt, E. Miguel, E. Levy Paluck, U. Simonsohn, C. Soderberg, B. A. Spellman, J. Turitto, G. VandenBos, S. Vazire, E. J. Wagenmakers, R. Wilson, and T. Yarkoni
2015
Research Methodology
The journal article is central to the research communication process. Guidelines for authors define what aspects of the research process should be made available to the community to evaluate, critique, reuse, and extend. Scientists recognize the value of transparency, openness, and reproducibility. Improvement of journal policies can help those values become more evident in daily practice and ultimately improve the public trust in science, and science itself.