Martino Pelli

Does the quality of electricity matter? Evidence from rural India

This paper estimates the returns to household income due to improved access to electricity in rural India. We examine the effect of connecting a household to the grid and the quality of electricity, defined as hours of daily supply. The analysis is based on two rounds of a representative panel of more than 10,000 households. We use the district-level density of transmission cables as instrument for the electrification status of the household. We find that a grid connection increases non-agricultural incomes of rural households by about 9 percent during the study period (1994-2005). However, a grid connection and a higher quality of electricity (in terms of fewer outages and more hours per day) increases non-agricultural incomes by about 28.6 percent in the same period.

That is the Story of a Hurricane: Within Country Impacts of Extreme Weather Events

There is little consensus in the economic literature on the effects of hurricanes on economic growth. This paper argues that this mixed evidence may result from ignoring the potential for hurricanes to generate heterogeneous impacts within countries. To test this hypothesis, we take advantage of highly disaggregated manufacturing export data over the period 1995- 2005 to examine whether the effect of hurricanes on the pattern of trade depends on productcountry- specific comparative advantage. Using a triple-difference identification strategy, we show evidence of heterogeneous effects: product lines with lower comparative advantage suffer disproportionately more.The comparative advantage of countries evolves over time, yet firms do not continuously adapt their production structure to this evolution. This slow adaptation may be due to high adjustment costs, such as those associated with the disposal of existing physical capital. In practice, these costs may explain why we observe that countries export goods at both ends of the comparative advantage spectrum. This article investigates what happens if the cost of adjusting to the dynamics of comparative advantage is unexpectedly reduced. We use hurricanes to evaluate whether a negative exogenous shock to firms’ physical capital leads to a reorganization of exports towards comparative advantage industries. Using a panel of 46 countries and 4-digit industries over the period 1980-2000, we show that the effect of hurricanes on exports is monotonically increasing in comparative advantage. Specifically, export levels drop for industries with a low comparative advantage and grow for industries with a high comparative advantage. Our results also indicate that the process of shifting resources towards higher comparative advantage industries intensifies within the three years following the shock. These findings suggest that if the opportunity cost of adjustment decreases, firms tend to build back better and move up the spectrum of comparative advantage.