Project by Chandra Kiran:
There is a vast literature on groundwater management when recharge is stochastic and when demand is known. Given the developed country setting of this literature, there is no corresponding focus on stochastic demand, especially when demand is a function of the price of crops. In a setting with high price variability, we illustrate that it is important to account for this source of uncertainty, for two reasons: first, the magnitude of this uncertainty can easily exceed that of natural recharge and second, the implications for risk averse farmers of multiple sources of uncertainty is substantial. In particular, the effect on steady state distribution of groundwater stock of increases in variability are very uncertain. We provide conditions under which increases in uncertainty lead to reduction in optimal withdrawal.
Month: January 2011
Climate Change Impacts on Indian Agriculture
Project by Chandra Kiran:
Using a 25-year panel on more than 300 districts, and newly available gridded climate datasets, we estimate the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. The effects of random year-to-year variations in weather are used to estimate the relationship between weather and agricultural yield, separately for the major food crops, for each season. This approach permits delineation of impacts by crop and by growing season, unlike previous work for India. In addition, we use a newly developed quantile regression framework for fixed effects panel data, which allows for differential impacts of weather and climate at different quantiles of yield. We find robust, negative impacts of climate change on wheat yields while impacts on Rice yields are positive at the lowest quantiles and are relatively unchanged at the higher quantiles.
Complementarity and Returns to Public and Private Capital for Microenterprises in Kibera, Nairobi
Project by Anna Tompsett
A ‘spine road’ is being constructed in Kibera, a large informal
settlement in the center of Nairobi. The road will vastly improve
transport access to the settlement. My proposed research project will
track a panel of microenterprises along the proposed route of the
road. The microenterprises will be incentivised to participate in the survey
with the opportunity to participate in a small grant lottery. We will
carefully track those businesses that exit the market (using mobile
phones and social networks) and those that enter the market as a
result. The resultant data will allow us to estimate the ‘return’ on
the investments in public capital (the road) and private capital (the
small grants), the distribution of those impacts, and, critically, to
determine whether the two interventions have a complementary effect.
The research outputs will contribute to the debate on how to achieve
sustainable economic development in informal settlements, the role of
infrastructure improvements, and the importance of integrated approaches
to intervention design.
The Flood in the Desert
Dealing with spatial and temporal variation
in water availability in a data-sparse environment
Project by Anna Tompsett
The project focuses on an area of the Niger Inland Delta near
Tombouctou, Mali, where there is very little data available for water
and agricultural management. Both traditional and modern agricultural
systems are however extremely dependent on the spatial and temporal
extent of the annual flood. The project aims to use landsat images to
generate maps of the area flooded with given probability at a given
time of the year.
The Economics of Energy Resource Development and Grid Interconnection
Project by Aly Sanoh
This paper analysis the optimal options to supply electricity to national economies from both domestic as well as distant resources using transmissions systems across the huge renewable energy resources of Africa. The overarching questions are: How to model continent wide energy development as it affects regional economies? How to model demand growth and how to evaluate the potential and costs of energy supply? What drive long transmission costs?
Municipal Taxes, Income, and Rainfall
Project by Aly Sanoh
This paper addresses three unresolved questions in the literature of public finance and development. First, it uses exogenous variation in rainfall across municipalities in Mali to estimate the causal effect of household income shocks on municipal level tax revenue performance. Second, it exploits a national tax collection incentive policy to measure the impacts of rainfall variation on local government spending. Third, it measures the effect of public goods capital spending on development outcomes at district levels.