arXiv subjects

Anna Tompsett

Publications and source records attributed to Anna Tompsett.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Economies of scale and the equity-efficiency trade-off: Evidence from a piped water network in rural Bangladesh

Policymakers who set prices for public infrastructure often anticipate an equity-efficiency trade-off: while higher prices could increase revenues from fee-paying users, helping to offset costs, they may reduce take-up among the poor. But this trade-off is fundamentally altered in the presence of economies of scale, which are common in infrastructure networks. We elicit willingness to pay for a household-level piped drinking water connection in rural Bangladesh, where truthful revelation of preferences is incentivized by the opportunity to connect to a new pipeline network that we construct, and we use project cost data to measure economies of scale. Combining the two, we show that the cost-effectiveness-maximizing price---that which minimizes the cost per connected household---is zero. Economies of scale strongly dominate revenues raised by user fees. More generally, the two conditions needed for a zero price to maximize cost-effectiveness are important economies of scale and high sensitivity of demand to prices near zero, which is well documented across developing countries. Since a zero price naturally maximizes equity, we conclude that economies of scale can eliminate the equity-efficiency trade-off.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Trade and pollution: Evidence from India

What happens to pollution when developing countries open their borders to trade? Theoretical predictions are ambiguous, and empirical evidence remains limited. We study the effects of the 1991 Indian trade liberalization reform on water pollution. The reform abruptly and unexpectedly lowered import tariffs, increasing exposure to trade. Larger tariff reductions are associated with relative increases in water pollution. The estimated effects imply a 0.11 standard deviation increase in water pollution for the median district exposed to the tariff reform.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Using satellite imagery to map rural marketplaces and monitor their activity at high frequency

In many rural areas of low- and middle-income countries, weekly gatherings of buyers and sellers are the most tangible manifestation of the market economy. Knowing these markets' whereabouts and activity over time could provide insights in otherwise data-scarce environments, helping researchers and policymakers to better understand poor rural economies. But these markets are by nature informal and scattered widely across often-remote regions. As a result, data on this fundamental institution are sparse and inconsistent. We develop, test, and apply a method to fill this gap, leveraging market activity's unique temporal and visual signature in satellite imagery. Using secondary data from Kenya, Malawi, and Mozambique, we first confirm that we detect markets with high sensitivity and specificity. We then derive a map of 1,776 markets in Ethiopia and track their activity at up-to-weekly frequency between 2017 and 2024. Measured market activity exhibits seasonal patterns following local agricultural calendars and responds to weather and conflict shocks. Our approach is applicable wherever satellites can regularly acquire images of rural periodic markets and requires no ground data. Once markets are mapped, our approach can be fully automated to produce an up-to-weekly measure of economic conditions in areas where such data is otherwise generally not available.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

A robot-assisted pipeline to rapidly scan 1.7 million historical aerial photographs

During the 20th Century, aerial surveys captured hundreds of millions of high-resolution photographs of the earth's surface. These images, the precursors to modern satellite imagery, represent an extraordinary visual record of the environmental and social upheavals of the 20th Century. However, most of these images currently languish in physical archives where retrieval is difficult and costly. Digitization could revolutionize access, but manual scanning is slow and expensive. Automated scanning could make at-scale digitization feasible, unlocking this visual record of the 20th Century for the digital era. Here, we describe and validate a novel robot-assisted pipeline that increases worker productivity in scanning 30-fold, applied at scale to digitize an archive of 1.7 million historical aerial photographs from 65 countries.

eess.IV↗