Basic Goods Consumption amid Crisis

It is often said that irregular basic service access is highly correlated with household income. While income certainly constraints a household's ability to pay for services such as electricity and sanitation, scholars still ignore many of the reasons for noncompliance among users from the middle-class. Our project tests the effects of alternative strategies to reduce electricity theft among consumers with sufficient capacity to pay for the service. Furthermore, the project aims at evaluating second order effects on other policy areas such as water supply and taxation (income tax, local fees, etc). We conduct a field experiment of different policy interventions by the Uruguayan electricity company (UTE).

Supported by: Laboratorio de Políticas Publicas - OPP and the UTE .