Privatization of public goods: Evidence from the sanitation sector in Senegal.

Privatization of a public good (the management of sewage treatment centers in Dakar, Senegal) leads to an increase in the productivity of downstream sewage dumping companies and a decrease in downstream prices of the services they provide to households. We use the universe of legal dumping of sanitation waste from May 2009 to May 2018 to show that legal dumping increased substantially following privatization-on average an increase of 74%, or an increase of about 1640 trips to treatment centers each month. This is due to increased productivity of all trucks, not just those associated with the company managing the privatized treatment centers.

Corrigendum to 'Can differences in individual learning explain patterns of technology adoption? Evidence on heterogeneous learning patterns and hybrid rice adoption in Bihar, India' [World Dev. 115 (2018) 178-189].

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.

Can differences in individual learning explain patterns of technology adoption? Evidence on heterogeneous learning patterns and hybrid rice adoption in Bihar, India.

Much empirical research that has shown that an individual's decision to adopt a new technology is the result of learning - both in personal experimentation as well as observing the experimentation of others. Yet even casual observation would suggest significant heterogeneity learning processes, manifesting itself in widely varying patterns of adoption over space and time. In this paper we explore this heterogeneity in the context of early adoption of hybrid rice in rural India.