Anant Sudarshan

Over 2 billion people lack clean drinking water. Existing solutions face high costs (piped water) or low demand (point-of-use chlorine). Using a 60,000-household cluster-randomized experiment, we test an alternative approach: decentralized treatment and home-delivery of clean water to the rural poor. At low prices, take-up exceeds 90 percent, sustained throughout the experiment. High prices reduce take-up but are privately profitable. We experimentally recover revealed-preference measures of valuation: willingness-to-pay is several times higher than prior indirect estimates, and willingness-to-accept is larger and exceeds marginal cost. Self-reported health measures improve accordingly. On a cost-per-DALY basis, free water-delivery regimes appear highly cost-effective.

Developing-country governments routinely attempt to collect revenue using threats they cannot systematically enforce. We study how citizens assess the credibility of such empty threats in the context of payment for electricity in Madhya Pradesh, India, where state-run utilities recovered only 60 cents per dollar of power supplied. Using two field experiments covering 30,000 households with high arrears, we show that the household response to a threat depends on the state's choice of messenger. Legal threats delivered by local linesmen — state agents with a history of ignoring non-payment — have no effect. Yet identical notices sent by registered mail, bypassing linesmen, reduce arrears by 11.4 percent among recipients, a 241 percent return on investment. A second experiment a year later shows these effects are dynamic: consumers originally visited by a linesman do not respond to future notices, while those never exposed to linesmen do. Low-credibility state agents can render threats ineffective.

The global electrification frontier is the set of places where households are getting electricity for the first time. The advent of off-grid solar means many households now choose between competing electricity sources. This paper estimates the demand for electricity, over all available sources, to understand how poor households make this choice and to value electrification. The setting is Bihar, India, where an experiment introduced solar microgrids and varied their price across 100 village-level markets for two and a half years. Combining the experiment with detailed survey data, we model household choices over a four-year period in which electrification rates leapt from 27% to 64%. Household surplus from electrification tripled, with gains due nearly as much to off-grid solar as to the subsidized grid; the surplus from electrification is 3–5× greater than from any single source. Nonetheless, we project future electrification will come mainly from the grid, as households prefer it as they grow wealthier.