text:   Impact of Electricity Access",5,"[""Pleased to share our working paper on the economic effects of grid-based electrification. A few thoughts to complement @MarshallBBurke's great thread. \n\n1. Satellite imagery and machine learning represent a new frontier for economics &amp; policy evaluation.\n\n<LINK>"", '2. Huge thanks to @atlasai_co, especially co-author Gabe Cadamuro, for their ground breaking work using satellite imagery &amp; AI to literally create new data in really challenging settings. \n\nHere, we use imputed outcomes to create a balanced dataset suitable for causal inference.', '3. One takeaway for other researches using similar methods is to be cognizant of the downstream task.  Optimizing for r2 in the CNN process may not be the best metric, as we show. \n\nThanks to Marshall, Brandon de la Cuesta and Matthieu Stigler for their brainpower on this.', '4. Ultimately, we find that new grid-based electrification had a substantial, statistically significant positive effect on asset wealth in Uganda, with electrified communities growing nearly 2x as fast as un-electrified comms.  \n\nThese results are robust to varying parameters.', '5. Stepping away from the paper &amp; putting on my policy hat, our results suggest that investments in grid extensions (while costly) have measurable, near-term impacts, even in low income settings.   \n\nAs 600m people in SSA lack electricity, we should accelerate grid extensions.']",21,09,1363