Alfredo Burlando

Power outages, power externalities, and baby booms.

Determining whether power outages have significant fertility effects is an important policy question in developing countries, where blackouts are common and modern forms of family planning are scarce. Using birth records from Zanzibar, this study shows that a month-long blackout in 2008 caused a significant increase in the number of births 8 to 10 months later. The increase was similar across villages that had electricity, regardless of the level of electrification; villages with no electricity connections saw no changes in birth numbers. The large fertility increase in communities with very low levels of electricity suggests that the outage affected the fertility of households not connected to the grid through some spillover effect. Whether the baby boom is likely to translate to a permanent increase in the population remains unclear, but this article highlights an important hidden consequence of power instability in developing countries. It also suggests that electricity imposes significant externality effects on rural populations that have little exposure to it.

Collusion and the Organization of the Firm

This paper shows that the threat of collusion between a productive agent and the auditor in charge of monitoring production can influence a number of organizational dimensions of the firm, including outsourcing decisions and the allocation of production costs. We find that the optimal organizational response to internal collusion lets the agent choose between working outside the firm (no monitoring and full claims over production costs) or within the firm (monitoring but no claims over costs). In equilibrium, there are no rents due to collusion. The results are robust to a number of extensions.

The Disease Environment, Schooling, and Development Outcomes: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract The disease environment could help explain underdevelopment in Africa. This article shows that local malaria risk is associated with worse local development outcomes. Combining an Ethiopian household survey with satellite-derived topographical information, the article shows that malaria incidence is correlated with village elevation, slope and their interaction; that is, malaria is sensitive to elevation in flatlands, where the habitat is suitable for mosquito breeding, but not in steeper lands. Using topography as a predictor of the disease environment, education levels are found to be negatively correlated with malaria. I find suggestive evidence that some other outcomes are related to malaria risk. Finally, the performance of topography predictors is assessed against other climate-based predictors of malaria.

The Impact of Malaria on Education: Evidence from Ethiopia

Estimates of the benefits of malaria reduction derived from countries that eradicated the disease are not necessarily applicable to sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria incidence and mortality is high and all eradication attempts were unsuccessful. This paper estimates the effects of malaria on schooling using geographic and survey data from Ethiopia. I show that self-reported malaria is highly correlated with village topographical characteristics. Using these environmental conditions as predictors of the disease, I estimate that moving from a village with no malaria to one with average malaria reduces schooling in children and adults by 0.30-0.60 years.