Abdoulaye Cisse

 The Value of Improved Electricity Reliability for Firms and Households: Evidence from Senegal

Abstract:

Electricity reliability is a major issue for firms and households in low-income countries. This project studies the value of persistent and large improvements in electricity reliability for consumers in Senegal. First, we exploit the staggered roll-out of a large-scale reliability improvement project and use rich disaggregated data on outages and consumers' appliances and economic activities. We study the long-term impact of outages on appliance adoption, electricity use, migration in/out neighbors, consumption and firm outcomes. Using these reduced-form estimates, we plan to develop a demand model to estimate consumer welfare associated with reliability for different groups of consumers and to shed light on the distributional impacts of reliability in contexts with low baseline electricity reliability.

Simon Greenhill

What Are the Health Costs of Noise Pollution?

Abstract:

Environmental noise pollution is ubiquitous yet has received little attention from economists. Correlational and lab studies suggest links between environmental noise exposure and adverse health effects ranging from sleep disruption to hypertension, heart disease, and increased suicide risk. A central challenge to studying noise pollution is a lack of data on ambient noise. I develop a new dataset measuring environmental noise using observations from seismic monitors. Leveraging high-frequency variation in noise from electric rail lines in California, I then estimate the causal effect of noise on infant health. Preliminary results suggest that electric train noise increases the risk of infant prematurity and low birth weight, with similar magnitudes to prior estimates of the impact of air pollution on infant health.