Social Learning among Urban Manufacturing Firms: Energy-Efficient Motors in Bangladesh

Ritam Chaurey (), Guarav Nayyar (), Siddharth Sharma () and Eric Verhoogen ()
Additional contact information
Ritam Chaurey: Johns Hopkins SAIS
Guarav Nayyar: The World Bank
Siddharth Sharma: The World Bank
Eric Verhoogen: Columbia University

No 18183, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Knowledge spillovers among firms are widely viewed as a key driver of agglomeration and growth, but are difficult to estimate cleanly. We randomly allocated an energy-efficient motor – a “servo'” motor – among leather-goods firms in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and tracked adoption, information flows, beliefs about energy savings, and other variables. We use the difference between actual exposure and expected exposure (from simulated randomization draws) to identify the effect of exposure. We find a robust positive effect of exposure to treated neighbors within a small geographic area (500 meters in our baseline specification) on information flows and adoption. A marginal value of public funds (MVPF) calculation taking learning spillovers into account yields a significantly larger value than one considering only treated firms and suggests that adoption subsidies would be a cost-effective policy intervention.

Keywords: knowledge spillovers; social learning; technology adoption; energy efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L23 L67 O12 O14 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ene, nep-geo, nep-knm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18183.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18183

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().