A First Step Up the Energy Ladder? Low Cost Solar Kits and Household's Welfare in Rural Rwanda

More than 1.3 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 initiative Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) has proclaimed the goal of providing modern energy to all by 2030. In recent years, Pico-Photovoltaic kits have become a lower-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 benchmark of what the UN considers as modern energy. We find significant effects on households' budget, productivity and convenience. Despite these effects, the data shows 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

Publication Bias under Aggregation Frictions: Theory, Evidence, and a New Correction Method

This paper questions the conventional wisdom that publication bias must result from the biased preferences of researchers. When readers only compare the number of positive and negative results of papers to make their decisions, even unbiased researchers will omit noisy null results and inflate some marginally insignificant estimates. Nonetheless, the equilibrium with such publication bias is socially optimal. The model predicts that published non-positive results are either precise null results or noisy but extreme negative results. This paper shows this prediction holds with some data, and proposes a new stem-based bias correction method that is robust to this and other publication selection processes

Three essays in economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, September, 2020Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis consists of three essays on diverse topics but shared emphasis on statistical models with theory and empirics. The first and third essay examines the role of cognitive limitations in understanding biases in communication and learning. The second essay, joint with Masao Fukui, highlights the role of distributional assumptions of infection rates for epidemiological predictions, responding to the recent COVID-19 outbreak. The first chapter considers the effects of aggregation frictions on scientific communication and shows that publication bias emerges even when researchers are unbiased and communicate their findings optimally for readers. Specifically, when readers are cognitively constrained, they may only consider the binary conclusions rather than the estimates of the papers. Under such aggregation frictions of readers, researchers are shown to omit noisy null results and inflate marginal results.This chapter presents evidence consistent with this prediction, and develops a new bias correction method, called stem-based correction method, that is robust under the prediction of this and other models of publication selection processes. The second chapter examines the role of infection rate distributions for aggregate epidemiological dynamics in Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) models. Specifically, we show that superspreading events (SSEs) of recent coronavirus outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, follow a power law distribution with fat tails, or infinite variance. When embedding this distribution to stochastic SIR models, we find that idiosyncratic variations in SSEs generate important uncertainties in aggregate epidemiological dynamics.This result stands in contrast with the existing literature on stochastic SIR models that have assumed thin tailed distributions, and thus concluded that the idiosyncratic uncertainties are unimportant when the population is large. The third chapter considers the impact of imperfect recall on experimentation decisions and resulting inferences. When a Bayesian experimenter has an imperfect recall over past actions and information, her decisions depend not only on a confidence level but also on the expectation the future self will hold for today's action. This expectation arises from the persistent prior belief, and leads to the biases to conform to it. Meditation, to regulate one's attention with focus on the present, is shown to have an ameliorating effect: when the attention is focused, prior belief becomes essentially diffused so that the self-imposed expectation over behaviors becomes agnostic.by Chishio Furukawa.Ph. D.Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economic

Impacts of Rural Electrification Revisited The African Context

The investment requirements to achieve the United Nations' universal electricity access goal by 2030 are estimated at 640 billion US Dollars. 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 that we collected in various African countries we show that impact expectations on income, education, and health should be discounted considerably for Africa, at least in the shorter run. In many cases, the low levels of electricity consumption can also be served by low-cost solar alternatives. To ensure cost-efficient usage of public investments into rural electrification, we call for careful cost-benefit comparisons of on-grid and off-grid solutions