Lights Off, Lights On: The Effects of Electricity Shortages on Small Firms

Morgan Hardy and Jamie Lee Mccasland

No 9093, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Entrepreneurs in developing countries report that unreliable electricity imposes a serious constraint, yet little evidence exists on how blackouts impact the micro firms that account for the majority of employment. This paper estimates the effects of outages on small firms using original firm-level panel data and finds evidence of differential effects by firm size. Firms without employees experience large reductions in revenues and profits. Outages have no measurable effect on the output of firms with employees, where worker hours increase, weekly wages paid decrease, and the analysis fails to reject that blackouts have no effect on (average firm-level) worker hourly wages.

Date: 2019-12-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-ent and nep-sbm
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Journal Article: Lights Off, Lights On: The Effects of Electricity Shortages on Small Firms (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9093

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