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Application of statistical models to energy and labor markets, An

Mathur, Shivani
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Gilbert, Benjamin
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Date
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2022
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Keywords
energy
 incomplete contracts
 labor markets
 reliability
 solar
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2022 - Mines Theses & Dissertations
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Mathur_mines_0052E_12544.pdf
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https://hdl.handle.net/11124/176597
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Abstract
The thesis explores empirical questions in energy and labor economics. In the first chapter, econometric techniques are employed to investigate the relationship between household access to electricity, hours of supply of electricity, and labor market outcomes, specifically, labor participation rates and number of working hours. Our results indicate limited effects of electricity reliability on rural and slum populations. For urban populations, electricity reliability improves both labor participation rates and labor hours for men and total populations, however, the magnitudes of these effects are small. Further, our results also suggest that men benefit more than women from reliable electrification with improved labor market outcomes in urban contexts, however, this does not hold true for rural contexts. In the second chapter, we ask what creates effective reciprocity in online labor markets. We investigate the gift exchange hypothesis using a large field experiment conducted through a crowdsourcing platform. We find that gift exchange or bonuses incentivize workers to spend more time on tasks and induce them to complete more tasks. However, they do not necessarily improve all dimensions of the data quality or outcome of a complex task. We also learn that outcomes can be improved on some dimensions i.e., completeness and productivity by skill matching. In the third chapter, we examine the relationship between distribution grid reliability and distributed solar capacity using proprietary utility feeder level data on reliability and solar installed capacity and econometric methods. Our results indicate that presence of solar capacity on a feeder, can help reduce outage duration on the feeder, while it does not impact the frequency of the outages. This relationship is dependent on the number of customers on the feeder. Low population feeders see improvements in reliability, with installation of solar capacity.
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