Another good upcoming jsde talk! ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Isabelle Cohen <imcohen@uw.edu> Date: Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 11:21 AM Subject: [jsde] Ted Miguel in JSDE on Monday, March 7 To: <jsde@u.washington.edu>, <econgrad@u.washington.edu>, <econfacall@uw.edu
Dear colleagues and students, We are pleased to announce that *Ted Miguel* (UC Berkeley) will be presenting at JSDE next week. The seminar will be held from *11:00 am - 12:30 pm *on *Monday, March 7*. The seminar and visit will be fully remote, with the talk held at the link below. The title and abstract of the talk are below. *Zoom link: *https://washington.zoom.us/j/98113334162. We have limited slots to meet with Professor Miguel. (1) *Faculty members*: Please sign up at this link <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c5wNZAkXt_4eVq1TrbpD3DGSwDfH22RRANn7lATBxI0/edit?usp=sharing>. If there are no spots remaining, please feel free to email me at imcohen@uw.edu. (2) *Graduate students*: If interested, please email me at imcohen@uw.edu with your availability to meet on Monday, but note that we are unlikely to be able to accommodate all requests. *Title*: *What does donor conditionality do? Causal evidence from Kenyan electrification *(joint with Catherine D. Wolfram, Eric Hsu and Susanna B. Berkouwer) *Abstract*: Multilateral organizations often impose conditions on the use of financing they provide low- and middle-income countries, but what do they do in practice? This question has been debated contentiously by governments, multilateral organizations, and academics since at least the 1980s. It is difficult to answer causally due to the endogeneity and low sample size of multilateral financing. To provide causal micro-evidence on this topic, we leverage an unusual feature of Kenya’s nationwide electrification program: the quasi-random allocation of villages across multilateral funding sources. We conduct detailed on-the-ground engineering assessments of transformers, conductors, and poles; collect minute-by-minute household-level outage and voltage data; and conduct household surveys on connection quality and usage. We find that relatively burdensome World Bank contracting procedures delayed the start and progress of construction by 6–10 months relative to African Development Bank funded projects, and led to significantly fewer connected sites and households four years later. Yet these conditions generated no detectable impact on construction quality, power outages, voltage quality, or household energy usage and spending. To disentangle two key dimensions of conditionality—ex ante contracting steps versus ex post audits—we implement a randomized audits scheme mimicking the latter, and find that this improves household connections at low cost and without delays. In this context, combining rigorous audits with more streamlined upfront contracting could potentially improve the quality of public projects while limiting construction delays. We look forward to seeing many of you there. Best, Isabelle -- Isabelle Cohen (pronouns: she/her) Assistant Professor, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance University of Washington _______________________________________________ jsde mailing list jsde@u.washington.edu http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/jsde