Rural electrification is a major tool that developing countries use to foster economic development. However, grid-line electrification in remote rural areas is often excessively costly, or faces environmental challenges. For these reasons, off-grid electrification, such as solar or wind power, may be the only feasible alternative in many isolated rural areas. In Chapter 1, I examine the impact of the solar power initiative for rural electrification on economic development by studying the effect of the Solar Home System Project that Thailand's government implemented during the time period 2004-2006. I exploit variation in the year of the solar installations across households to identify the program's causal effects using household-level panel data, which allows me to control for household fixed effects, trends, and province-year effects. I find that solar units increase household income by 6.9%. This result is robust to other identification strategies, such as lagged dependent variable, propensity score reweighting, and differences-in-differences with propensity score matching. I also apply a back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate the costs and benefits of the program. I find that the net present value of this project is about 1 billion baht or $25 million.Since the growing concern for climate change in the 1990s, policymakers around the world have been enthusiastically supporting a wide range of incentive mechanisms for renewable energy use, including in the electric power sector. In chapter 2, I use a technology-specific subsidy program for small electricity producers in Thailand to understand the response of producers to subsidy incentives. In 2009, the Thai government adjusted the subsidy policy to favor a relatively small power plant. The production subsidy for electricity generators that have less than 1MW of capacity is higher than the subsidy for generators that have just over 1MW of capacity. Since the total subsidy is a step function with a "notch" at 1MW, power producers who plan to build a plant near 1 MW will have an incentive to respond strategically by building a plant on the side of the notch with a higher subsidy. I develop a structural model of bunching to understand the linkage between the subsidy policy and power plant producers' behavior. Then, I use a test developed by McCrary (2008) to examine the distribution of power plant size for electricity producers subject to the subsidy policy in 2009. I find evidence of bunching around the notch. A falsification test shows that similar bunching does not exist in the distribution of plant size built before the introduction of the notched subsidy payment.In the final chapter, I examine the impact of the first car buyer tax rebate program in Thailand on the share of eligible cars and eco-car sales. Province level data of monthly new vehicle registrations by vehicle model during 2007-2012 are employed in the analysis in this study. This panel data set allows me to control for vehicle model and province-time fixed effects when examining the relationship between the program and share of vehicle sales. The estimation results indicate an 18% increase in the share of eligible cars sales after the introduction of the program in September 2011. However, the share of eco-car sales is unaffected by the program.
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