Essays in Energy and Development Economics

Abstract

This dissertation studies topics in environmental and energy economics with a focus on developing countries. Combining detailed billing and outages records with original survey data, the first two chapters shed light on how residential, informal settlement, commercial and industrial customers in urban India respond to retail electricity prices, how they value electricity reliability and the implications for efficient retail pricing. The third chapter focuses on how the absence of centralized and dynamic wholesale electricity markets affects the relative performance of market-based environmental policies.