Privatization of public goods: Evidence from the sanitation sector in Senegal

Journal of Development Economics · 2022 · 13 citations

• Business
• Agricultural economics
• Economics

Privatization of a public good (the management of sewage treatment centers in Dakar, Senegal) leads to an increase in the productivity of downstream sewage dumping companies and a decrease in downstream prices of the services they provide to households. We use the universe of legal dumping of sanitation waste from May 2009 to May 2018 to show that legal dumping increased substantially following privatization-on average an increase of 74%, or an increase of about 1640 trips to treatment centers each month. This is due to increased productivity of all trucks, not just those associated with the company managing the privatized treatment centers. Household-level survey data shows that downstream prices of legal sanitary dumping decreased by 5% following privatization, and DHS data shows that diarrhea rates among children under five decreased in Dakar relative to secondary cities in Senegal following privatization with no similar effect on respiratory illness as a placebo.

Spillovers without Social Interactions in Urban Sanitation

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 11 citations

• Geography
• Environmental planning
• Business

Information Technology and Government Decentralization: Experimental Evidence From Paraguay

Econometrica · 2021 · 51 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Business

Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors—middle managers—when ministerial leadership—the principal—introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that elicited treatment‐priority rankings from supervisors before randomization of treatment. We find that supervisors have valuable information—they prioritize AEAs who would be more responsive to the monitoring treatment. We develop a model of monitoring under different scales of treatment roll‐out and different treatment allocation rules. We semiparametrically estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) to demonstrate that the value of information and the benefits to decentralizing treatment decisions depend crucially on the sophistication of the principal and on the scale of roll‐out.

Privatization of Public Goods: Evidence from the Sanitation Sector in Senegal

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021

• Business
• Economic growth
• Natural resource economics