While rural electrification has been a high priority for many governments in the developing world, the factors that make individual households more likely to pay for a connection have received insufficient attention. In particular, many studies have dealt with the role of affordability of grid...

How can demand for electricity be estimated without fine-grained usage data? Employing an original and large dataset, we develop a novel method for determining drivers of demand without electricity meter data. We first segment Indian consumers by their willingness to pay for electricity service,...

Even as India pursues universal electricity access, household electricity demand remains poorly understood. While studies have investigated residential electricity consumption, most focus on urban consumers, even though a majority of the newly electrified households are in rural areas. Using...

How beneficial is basic energy access – typically lighting and mobile charging – for rural households? Despite research on the economic impacts of basic energy access, few studies have investigated how it changes household behavior. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial...

We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India's national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India's caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was...

The International Energy Agency estimates that more than a billion people remain without household electricity access. However, countries such as India have recently made major progress in rural electrification. Who has benefited from these achievements? We focus on 714 villages in six...

Subjective satisfaction is a central element of technology adoption, but scholars have not analyzed the determinants of households' satisfaction with their cooking arrangements. Drawing on an original survey of 8,568 households across six Indian states, we uncover the predictors of such...

Rural electrification has progressed unevenly across the world since 1945, with some rural communities gaining access to power decades earlier than others. We examine the association between early electrification and the quality of electricity service to households, testing the hypothesis that...