India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification...

Poor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water. How then do they respond to improved access to water infrastructure? Does it increase their participation in income earning market-based activities? Does it improve the health and education outcomes of their...

This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. The analysis uses a novel measure of women's empowerment that is closely linked...

The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals' utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. Koolwal and Ray extend the collective...

Based on a randomized survey experiment in Malawi, this study examines how innovative techniques in time use data collection could sidestep measurement concerns with traditional recall-based time use measurement. The experiment assigns random samples of households, and adult men and women...

This paper presents evidence that increased earnings opportunities for girls can lower household preference for sons, as measured by the household's average reported ideal number of sons relative to ideal number of children. Using the 1995-96 Nepal Living Standards Survey, I find that reported...