Effects of Rural Electrification on Employment: A Comment on Dinkelman

Bensch, Gunther; Gotz, Gunnar; Peters, Jörg

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3568176

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…7 Dinkelman (2011) addresses this concern by running a placebo test and other robustness checks. Bensch, Gotz, and Peters (2019) perform alternative placebo tests and show that land gradient is correlated with employment outcomes in nonelectrified areas, suggesting a violation of the exclusion restriction. They provide evidence that land gradient also influenced road placement.…”

Section: Different Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

Lee¹,

Miguel

Wolfram

2020

Journal of Economic Perspectives

104

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In recent years, electrification has reemerged as a key priority in low-income countries, with a particular focus on electrifying households. Yet the microeconomic literature examining the impacts of electrifying households on economic development has produced a set of conflicting results. Does household electrification lead to measurable gains in living standards or not? Focusing on grid electrification, we discuss how the divergent conclusions across the literature can be explained by differences in methods, interventions, potential for spillovers, and populations. We then use experimental data from Lee, Miguel, and Wolfram (2019) — a field experiment that connected randomly selected households to the grid in rural Kenya — to show that impacts can vary even across individuals in neighboring villages. Specifically, we show that households that were willing to pay more for a grid electrification may gain more from electrification compared to households that would only connect for free. We conclude that access to household electrification alone is not enough to drive meaningful gains in development outcomes. Instead, future initiatives may work better if paired with complementary inputs that allow people to do more with power.

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Section: Different Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

Lee¹,

Miguel

Wolfram

2020

Journal of Economic Perspectives

104

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“…To deal with the proliferation of reporting standards, the Equator Network has been established to organize these guidelines and help researchers identify the most appropriate set of guidelines for their research. 33 There are obviously very strong, and well understood, norms regarding how to report 32 See for example http://www.icmje.org/ recommendations/browse/manuscript-preparation/ preparing-for-submission.html#two and http://jama. jamanetwork.com/public/instructionsForAuthors.…”

Section: Disclosure and Reporting Standardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…aspx#ClinicalTrials. 33 Equator: Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research, see http://www.equator-network.org/. empirical results in economics studies, but there are far fewer formal guidelines or reporting checklists than in medical research.…”

Section: Disclosure and Reporting Standardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

Christensen

Miguel

2018

Journal of Economic Literature

299

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Abstract:There is growing interest in enhancing research transparency and reproducibility in economics and other scientific fields. We survey existing work on these topics within economics, and discuss the evidence suggesting that publication bias, inability to replicate, and specification searching remain widespread in the discipline. We next discuss recent progress in this area, including through improved research design, study registration and pre-analysis plans, disclosure standards, and open sharing of data and materials, drawing on experiences in both economics and other social sciences. We discuss areas where consensus is emerging on new practices, as well as approaches that remain controversial, and speculate about the most effective ways to make economics research more credible in the future. 1 We thank the editor Steven Durlauf and four anonymous referees for useful comments.

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“…It is important to emphasize that our framework does not cover concerns related to the IV's exclusion restriction, as they are discussed for a comparable case in Bensch, Gotz, and Peters (2020). For LMB ( 2013), the exclusion restriction could be violated by water availability and land gradient spurring population growth and economic growth independently of electricity provision, for example via the suitability for coffee production.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spotlight on researcher decisions – Infrastructure evaluation, instrumental variables, and first-stage specification screening

Ankel-Peters¹,

Vance²,

Bensch³

2022

Preprint

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This paper revisits the instrumental variable (IV) approach in Lipscomb et al. (2013, 2021) to study the impacts of electrification. We first identify errors in the construction of the dataset, including the modelled IV. Revised estimates on main outcomes and mechanisms are statistically insignificant, with substantially lower effect sizes. We second develop a framework that accounts for weak IVs and discourages specification screening. We find that most theoretically justified specifications in the Lipscomb et al. (2013, 2021) data deliver insignificant results. The proposed framework is transferable to other IV applications to reduce potential bias stemming from researcher’s or replicator’s discretion.

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Effects of Rural Electrification on Employment: A Comment on Dinkelman

Cited by 7 publications

References 54 publications

Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

Spotlight on researcher decisions – Infrastructure evaluation, instrumental variables, and first-stage specification screening

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