Juan Pablo Rud | Searcharxiv

arXiv2020

Community Matters: Heterogeneous Impacts of a Sanitation Intervention

We study the effectiveness of a community-level information intervention aimed at improving sanitation using a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Nigerian communities. The intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), is currently part of national sanitation policy in more than 25 countries. While average impacts are exiguous almost three years after implementation at scale, the results hide important heterogeneity: the intervention has strong and lasting effects on sanitation practices in poorer communities. These are realized through increased sanitation investments. We show that community wealth, widely available in secondary data, is a key statistic for effective intervention targeting. Using data from five other similar randomized interventions in various contexts, we find that community-level wealth heterogeneity can rationalize the wide range of impact estimates in the literature. This exercise provides plausible external validity to our findings, with implications for intervention scale-up. JEL Codes: O12, I12, I15, I18.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2019

Climate Change and Agriculture: Subsistence Farmers' Response to Extreme Heat

This paper examines how subsistence farmers respond to extreme heat. Using micro-data from Peruvian households, we find that high temperatures reduce agricultural productivity, increase area planted, and change crop mix. These findings are consistent with farmers using input adjustments as a short-term mechanism to attenuate the effect of extreme heat on output. This response seems to complement other coping strategies, such as selling livestock, but exacerbates the drop in yields, a standard measure of agricultural productivity. Using our estimates, we show that accounting for land adjustments is important to quantify damages associated with climate change.

econ.GN↗