Time for Clean Energy? Cleaner Fuels and Women's Time in Home Production

of the and not those of IZA. Research in series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. aims answers to the global labor of our time. Our key objective to bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. ABSTRACT In much of the developing world, cooking accounts for most of women’s time in home production. Does reliance on biomass for cooking drive this time burden? To assess time-savings from shifting towards cleaner fuels, we revisit a clean energy information experiment in rural India. Treatment villages were randomly assigned to receive information about negative health effects of cooking with solid fuels and about public subsidies for cleaner Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG). Using rich time use data and a propensity score matching approach, we estimate that switching towards cleaner cooking fuels could potentially save 19-20 minutes of home production time per day. Exploiting the randomized information nudge and endline data collected one year after the intervention, our intent-to-treat estimate of actual time saved is 5 minutes per day. We discuss why nudges towards cleaner energy use at home are unlikely to generate transformative shifts in women’s home production time. However, Census data on ‘distance of village to block headquarters’ is missing for 260 households (13 villages). Using Google Map’s Distance Matrix Application Programming Interface (API), we impute the traveling distance between the sampled villages and its block headquarters and use this variable as a control instead. The correlation between this imputed traveling distance and census data is 0.84 (mean census (Google API) distance is 18.07 (20.01) km, as against the mean straight-line distance of 13.70 km) for the 137 villages with Census distance data. Our results do not vary if we use a dummy for missing distance data scores between treated (households with a LPG Connection) and control (households without a LPG Connection) groups. Control variables include household size and assets, education and primary occupation of the household head, education and age of the primary cook, indicators for household religion and caste and indicators for the presence of private primary schools, health sub-center, distance to block headquarters, all-weather road access and proportion of irrigated land. We also control for seven deprivation indices for PMUY eligibility, i.e., dummies for households with only one room, kucha walls and kucha roof, female-headed households with no adult male member, SC/ST households.