Cooking Up Success: The Impact of Access to Clean Stoves on Children's Learning
About a third of the global population relies on solid fuels for cooking with significant known impacts on health and time use. However, there is limited evidence on the impact of this reliance on further downstream outcomes like children's educational attainment. This paper is the first to examine the impact of gaining access to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as a fuel for cooking on children's learning outcomes. Leveraging the variation in the district level intensity of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), the world’s largest clean cooking transition program, and nationally representative data on foundational learning from India, I find that increased access to LPG leads to improved learning outcomes in both reading and math for primary school-aged children. I also find larger positive impacts on learning for girls, households in the middle of the wealth distribution, and older children. I provide evidence for the fact that these effects are driven by improved health of children, which may allow them to participate more in activities that aid learning like attending school.
Electric Stoves as a Solution for Household air pollution: Evidence from rural India (with E. Somanathan, Marc Jeuland, Eshita Gupta, Utkarsh Kumar, Rachit Kamdar, Vidisha Chowdhury, Suvir Chandna, Michael Bergin, Karoline Barkjohn. Christina Norris, T. Robert Fetter and Subdhrendu Pattanayak)
We collected minute-by-minute data on electricity availability, electric induction stove use, and kitchen and outdoor particulate pollution in a sample of rural Indian households for one year. Using within household-month variation generated by unpredictable outages, we estimate the effects of electricity availability and electric induction stove use on kitchen PM2.5 concentration at each hour of the day. Electricity availability reduces kitchen PM2.5 by up to 50 μg/m3 which is between 10 and 20 percent of peak concentrations during cooking hours. Induction stove use instrumented by electricity availability reduces PM2.5 in kitchens by 200-450 μg/m3 during cooking hours.
When Tradition Pollutes: Health and Environmental Costs of Multi-Generational Living in India
Air pollution from biomass fueled cooking stoves is one of the biggest health hazards in the developing world. This paper explores the link between a multi generational traditional household structure and use of solid fuels for cooking in a patriarchal society by looking at the effect of the father-in-law's death on the choice of household cooking fuel in India. Using a difference in differences model with household fixed effects, I find that the probability of using biomass exclusively for cooking is lower by about 6 percent in households where a co-residing father-in-law died compared to a household where they did not. I also find that the probability of collecting every major fuel is lower as well. I find evidence for this effect to be driven primarily by the father in law's preference for food that is cooked in the traditional way.
Intrahousehold Differences in Perceived Health Risks of using Solid Fuels for Cooking (with Ananya Diwakant)
Cluster RCT funded by the Weiss Fund for Development Economists
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 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.
The Pathways to Choice- Learning to Scale (with Isabelle Cohen- Intervention in progress)