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Job Market Paper: Who Needs to Know? Intra-household Differences in Responses to Health Information (with T.V. Ninan) 

Supported by the Weiss Fund

 
Exposure to household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels is a major health risk in many low- and middle-income settings, particularly for women. This paper examines whether providing information about these risks changes beliefs and behaviors, and whether the identity of the information recipient within the household matters. We test this using a cluster randomized controlled trial with 2,000 households in rural India, where we inform either the (male) household head or the (female) primary cook about the actual health risks of cooking with solid fuels. Sixteen weeks after the intervention, we find that information provision changes primary cooks’ beliefs by 0.21 standard deviation but not household heads’. Despite the increase in awareness, we find no average effect on fuel use. We find that less empowered women updated their beliefs more but did not change behavior, consistent with limited intra-household bargaining power. In contrast, more educated primary cooks, who are not necessarily more empowered in our setting, both updated their beliefs more and reduced solid fuel use at the intensive margin. Together, these findings suggest that both low salience of information and low bargaining power of women limit the effect of the information intervention on household fuel choice, while education enables primary cooks to act on new information along margins that may not require explicit bargaining with the household head.