Experimental Design
Our experiment will take place across 140 distribution feeders in rural areas of Punjab, Pakistan over a 12-month period. The experiment consists of the following treatments:
A. Religious Messaging [Mosques] (65 Feeders)
B. Secular Messaging [Social gathering] (10 Feeders)
D. Control (65 Feeders)
Our level of randomization is large. A typical distribution feeder covers 5-6 villages with an average of over 3,500 customers per feeder. The largest mosques in each village will be recruited for the treatment. Akhuwat will help recruit communities into the various treatments, bringing down costs and setting us up for a future scale up. We randomize at the feeder level because this is the lowest level we can observe direct measurements of outright electricity theft via illegal hooks onto power lines, a common form of theft in our sample area.
Our focus is on rural areas. We stratify our sample based on the pre-treatment feeder category assigned by the government. The government classifies a feeder into different categories (I to VII) based on its historical aggregate technical and commercial losses. This category, in turn, determines the amount of scheduled power outages a particular feeder will face. Stratifying based on these bins will therefore ensure a cleaner comparison between treatment and control, especially since outages may influence payment or theft decisions. We control for further covariates, notably number of customers in a feeder and baseline incomes, that may influence our outcomes.
Monthly electricity billing and supply data at both the individual and feeder level will be provided by the government. This will let us measure our two core outcomes of interest: changes in outright electricity theft, as measured by the difference between incoming feeder supply and billed power, and changes in bill recovery, as measured by changes in the proportion of monthly household electricity bills that get paid. These outcomes provide a revealed preference measure for whether social norms change.
Household surveys (30-40 per feeder) will supplement this data to elicit beliefs on paying for electricity as well as measure religiosity. The household survey captures three major aspects:
- Basic Household Information: demographics, asset ownership, income and expenditure, numeracy and literacy tests, risk preferences and loss aversion, shocks
- Electricity: electricity sources, consumption, payments, reasons for partial/non-payment and theft, power outages, beliefs on enforcement and whether people believe that electricity is a right
- Religiosity: we elicit levels of religiosity (intrinsic, extrinsic, general) in a similar vein to Bryan, Choi & Karlan (2021). We included detailed questions on mosque and Friday sermon attendance.
- Networks: we are currently testing a survey instrument in a sample of villages to generate aggregate relational data that can identify likely network ties in local communities (Breza, Chandrasekhar, McCormick & Pan, 2020). This would enable us to trace out whether changes in outcomes following the receival of the treatment (e.g. listened to mosque sermon) extend via social networks to ‘untreated’ households (e.g. those who did not attend) within a community.