Browsing by Subject "Impact evaluation"
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Item Open Access Energy access, time use, and women’s empowerment in low- and middle-income countries(2024) Chandrasekaran, Maya ParvathiThis dissertation examines aspects of the relationship between improved energy access,both in terms of cooking energy and electricity access, and women’s time use patterns, labor productivity, and empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and various measures of cooking energy and electricity access across 7 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia using the multi-tiered framework datasets from the World Bank. Since there are many potential facets to women’s empowerment, for example, social standing (i.e., ability to participate in community groups, ability to move freely), employment, or education levels, we use principal component analysis to create an “empowerment index” that captures multiple aspects of women’s empowerment as a singular value. We then use simple regression analysis to study the correlation between women’s empowerment and energy access measures. We find positive associations between empowerment and measures of energy access, though this pattern is not consistent across all countries and contexts.
After descriptively establishing a positive relationship between women’s empowermentand improved cooking energy access, especially in Sub-Saharan African contexts, the second chapter of this dissertation describes an impact evaluation of an improved cookstove distributed in Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We used a quasi-experimental design to survey approximately 3,000 households across three countries, looking for impacts on women’s time use patterns and labor productivity as a result of take up of the improved cookstove. Using a difference-indifferences approach, we find that in most contexts, this improved cookstove intervention does not result in changes to time use patterns, labor productivity, or time use agency, though the lack of positive impacts may be due to sample contamination, too short of a time frame between stove installation and endline surveys, or reporting errors in modules where time use data is collected.
In order to understand these results in the context of prior published evidence of timesavings from improved cookstoves, in the third chapter, we investigate the population and study characteristics that may impact the time saved in fuel collection as a result of the distributed improved cookstove. Specifically, we apply Bayesian linear regression modeling and Bayesian model comparison to investigate whether and how methodological and contextual choices, such as geography, level of remoteness of a region, fuel use behaviors, the type of time use elicitation method used, and respondent characteristics affect estimates of time savings in fuel collection derived from the cookstove distributed in Chapter 2. Our prior is constructed from 34 estimates of time savings from the improved cookstove literature, while our sampling data is provided by the quasi-experiment in Chapter 2. The approach provides insight on how different sources of variation impact time savings estimates and allows us to make predictions of potential time savings in new settings. Results suggest that the potential for time savings from this improved cookstove is highest in poorer, less educated populations.
In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature by first describing the relationshipsbetween forms of energy access, including improved cooking technologies, and women’s empowerment, and describing those patterns across countries. I then test this relationship using quasi-experimental methods to find causal impacts of improved cooking technologies on outcomes pertinent to women’s livelihoods, including women’s time use patterns, across four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, I provide insight into how population and study characteristics impact time savings results from improved cooking technologies, and in what contexts we might find maximum impact.
Item Open Access Scoping an Impact Evaluation of the Phase II World Bank-Financed West Africa Regional Fisheries Program(2019-04-26) Lin, YueCoastal West Africa has some of the richest fishing grounds in the world due to its climatic and ecological conditions, yet poverty in this region is severe and widespread despite its fishing asset. The fishery resources could have contributed more to coastal West Africa’s economic growth if managed in a more efficient and sustainable manner. So far, the World Bank has finished phase I of the West Africa Regional Fisheries Program to improve fisheries management. However, few impact evaluations have been done to support such interventions due to insufficient evidence in outcomes and gap in the changing theories. In developing the second phase of the program, the World Bank hopes to ensure that the project design is able to support an evidence-based decision-making process and a robust impact evaluation. This MP develops a concept note for the project design team to scope an impact evaluation for the phase II program, using the project management methodology, Theory of Change (ToC). This concept note includes 1) discussing the gap in phase I project design; 2) reconstructing a ToC for phase I; 3) developing a ToC for phase II; and 4) recommending methods for measuring the impact of the phase II interventions.Item Open Access Three Essays on Energy and Development Economics(2019) Usmani, FarazGlobal energy-use patterns are characterized by deep inequality. Electricity is indispensable for households, clinics, schools and firms, yet over a billion people live without it. At the same time, nearly three billion rely on traditional stoves and polluting biomass fuels (such as firewood) for their basic energy needs. The resulting household air pollution causes four million deaths annually, a health burden borne disproportionately by women. The international community has hastened to respond to this global energy challenge. This dissertation highlights how—and under what conditions—policies that seek to ensure universal access to modern energy deliver expected environmental and development benefits.
In the first chapter, I ask what drives heterogeneity in the impacts of large-scale rural electrification. Prior evidence on the labor-market impacts of grid electrification is mixed. I hypothesize that variation in local economic conditions—which can complement investments in infrastructure—may help explain why, and combine two natural experiments in India within a regression discontinuity design to test this hypothesis. Most of the world's guar, a crop that yields a potent thickening agent used during hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), is grown in northwestern India. The rapid rise of fracking in the United States induced a parallel commodity boom in Indian guar production, resulting in a large positive shock to rural economic activity. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India's massive rural electrification scheme, I show that access to electricity significantly increased non-agricultural employment in villages located in India's booming guar belt. Where these complementary economic conditions were lacking, electrification had almost no discernible impact. Using a firm-level panel dataset, I then provide suggestive evidence that this growth in non-farm work is partly driven by the rise of electricity-intensive firms that complement agricultural production. In line with the prior literature, I show that electrification alone may not be sufficient to deliver economic benefits, but I also demonstrate that, when combined with complementary economic conditions on the ground, access to electricity can enable individuals, households and firms to take advantage of new opportunities in potentially welfare-enhancing ways.
In the second chapter, I turn to household-level energy use and empirically evaluate the role played by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in delivering environmental, energy and development interventions in remote, rural settings. I develop a model of household decision-making to evaluate how NGOs address implementation-related challenges and influence intervention effectiveness. To test the model's predictions, I apply quasi-experimental methods to household-survey data from a randomized controlled trial designed to promote clean-cooking solutions in rural India. I uncover a large, positive and statistically significant "NGO effect": prior engagement with the implementing NGO increases the effectiveness of the intervention by at least thirty percent. These findings provide some of the first causal evidence on how NGOs directly influence outcomes, which has implications for the generalizability of experimental research conducted jointly with such local partners. In particular, attempts to scale up findings from such work may prove less successful than anticipated if the role of NGOs is insufficiently understood. Alternatively, policymakers looking to scale up could achieve greater success by fostering partnerships with trusted local institutions.
In the final chapter, I consider how heterogeneity in households' preferences influences demand for energy technologies. I conduct technology-promotion campaigns followed by second-price, sealed-bid ("Vickrey") auctions for two cleaner cooking technologies with over 1,000 households across seventy communities in rural Senegal. I induce exogenous variation in the extent to which these promotion activities cater to heterogeneous preferences by randomly assigning a subset of communities to an auction arm in which both devices are promoted jointly. Consistent with a model in which preferences are constructed—and not simply revealed—as agents make repeated choices, joint promotion lowers willingness to pay for the relatively less familiar alternative compared to settings in which the two devices are promoted exclusively. Rather than simply providing additional choices, implementers looking to enhance uptake of improved technologies must instead devise approaches to help potential end-users think carefully through trade-offs, crystallize and understand their own preferences, and identify solutions that fit their needs.
Item Open Access Three Essays on Evaluating Forest Conservation Programs in Developing Countries(2021) He, WumengDeforestation and forest degradation in developing countries are leading causes of environmental problems such as soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and climate change. As a result, policies aimed at slowing down or reversing the trend of deforestation and forest degradation have attracted considerable attention. This dissertation consists of three essays on evaluating forest conservation programs in developing countries. Although the focus of each essay differs, they all use rigorous econometric methods to provide insights on impacts of historical forest conservation programs and assist stakeholders in modifying existing policies and making future ones more efficient and effective.
I begin by assessing the nutritional impact of payments for ecosystem services (PES) in the context of rural China (i.e., Chapter 2). PES is a special type of conditional cash transfer (CCT) in which the conditionality is explicitly attached with conservation practices. In this chapter I develop a stylized household-farm model to show that when households participate in a land-diversion PES program, they would settle for lower levels of food consumption if they lack market access. Exploiting panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), I use a triple difference (TD) model to examine the impact of China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), one of the largest PES programs in the world, on the nutrient intake of farming households. My findings suggest that the SLCP had a significant negative impact, though small, on calorie intake and this effect was likely driven by missing market in areas that implemented the SLCP. This essay demonstrates that land-diversion PES, which is a dual conservation and development tool, could affect food consumption and nutrition in ways very different from other conservation programs such as protected areas (PAs) as well as regular CCT programs that only aim for poverty reduction.
I then shift the focus from PES to PAs by implementing innovative evaluation methods to assess the effectiveness of mangrove protection in Southeast and South Asia (i.e., Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). Economists typically estimate the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) when evaluating government programs. The welfare interpretation of the ATT can be ambiguous when program outcomes are measured in purely physical terms, as they often are in evaluations of environmental programs (e.g., avoided deforestation). In Chapter 3, my co-authors and I present an approach for inferring welfare impacts from physical outcomes when the ATT is estimated using propensity-score matching. We employ the discrete-choice Roy model of selection into treatment to show that the ex post net social value of a forest conservation program can be proxied as a weighted ATT, with the weights being utility measures derived from the propensity of being treated. We apply this new metric to mangrove forest conservation in Thailand during 1987–2000. Wefind that the Thai government’s conservation program protected approximately 30% of the social welfare that would have been lost if all the protected mangrove area had been deforested. This magnitude is very similar to the magnitude of a conventional ATT that measures avoided deforestation, but we show that the potential range of the welfare-based ATT extends from barely a quarter of the conventional physical measure to nearly twice as large as it.
While Chapter 3 adopts an indirect approach to infer the welfare impact of PAs, Chapter 4 exploits the same idea in a direct approach. In Chapter 4, my co-authors and I exploit rich data on carbon stock and land values in India toestimate and predict spatial heterogeneity in the benefit (i.e., carbon sequestration) and cost (i.e., forgone land value) of mangrove conservation. We combine this information with satellite-based data on India’s mangrove coverage in 1990– 2010 to construct a net land value, and then estimate the causal impact of PAs on the net land value. This new approach allows us to account for spatial heterogeneity in the net economic benefit of conservation. Our results show that incorporating the economics of conservation into evaluation could detect impact of PAs that would not be detected under the conventional approach that focuses only on avoided deforestation. Estimates from our heterogeneity treatment effect model suggest that the level and direction of PA’s impact is associated with the road proximity of mangrove sites and differs between the short run and the long run.
The three essays in my dissertation examine the heterogeneity in effects of forest conservation programs in one way or another. They highlight that the efficiency and effectiveness of conservation programs depend on local contexts. When designing and implementing future conservation programs, policymakers should assess local contexts and adjust program features accordingly.
Item Open Access Three Essays On Protecting Biodiversity In Developing Countries(2013) Miteva, DanielaDeveloping countries often hoard the largest number of species, but also experience very high poverty levels. This dissertation reviews the evidence of the performance common conservation interventions. I find that despite the billions of dollars channeled towards conservation efforts annually, there is still very limited evidence whether or not conservation policies work. The evidence has been limited to exceptional countries like Costa Rica and Thailand and outlines like deforestation, without considering ecosystem function and ecosystem services. Furthermore, I find that the conservation impact evaluation literature has currently not highlighted the channels through which conservation policies effect change and how the effectiveness varies with the baseline characteristics of the area.
This dissertation aims to address some of the gaps in current conservation literature. Focusing on Indonesia between 2000 and 2006, I evaluate the performance of protected areas in terms of stalling deforestation as well as providing a wide range of ecosystem services and benefits (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3 I examine the role of context in which protected areas operate and show significant heterogeneity in their performance. In Chapter 4 I develop a static spatially explicit model of household fuelwood extraction that allows me to predict the location and magnitude of spillovers when a protected area is introduced. I find that depending on the characteristics of the areas, it may be optimal for households to buy fuelwood than collect it.