Three essays on labor and development economics

Abstract

My dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter analyzes whether the use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) as cooking fuel affects the time spent in cooking and employment activities for Indian rural women. The second chapter explores whether use of cleaner energy source for cooking leads to increased female work participation. The third chapter investigates trends in the allocation of time within India between 1999 and 2019.

The first chapter studies whether the use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) as cooking fuel affects the time spent in cooking and employment activities for Indian rural women, using the nationally representative Indian Time Use Survey. I instrument use of LPG by a leave-one-out spatial instrument constructed by taking the average level of LPG use in the village where the average is calculated leaving the concerned household. I find no impact of LPG on the probability of women participating in cooking activities. However, use of LPG reduces (increases) time spent in cooking (employment) activities. I also find evidence of rebound effect where use of LPG leads to marginally more cooking events in a day. I find that LPG impact on time spent in cooking and employment is mostly driven by married women.

The second chapter investigates whether use of cleaner energy source for cooking leads to increased female work participation, using the nationally representative Indian Human Development Survey. The methodology used in this paper is difference-in-differences with multivalued treatment. I find that switching from solid to mixed fuel negatively affects women's work participation. This study also confirms that switching from mixed to modern fuel will increase the probability of female work participation in rural India significantly. Moreover, I do not find any average treatment effect on the female work participation for households who maintain the status quo.

The third chapter analyzes the time allocation trends and inequality of time use in the past 20 years using India's time-use surveys for 1999 and 2019. I observe a sharp rise in leisure time and the concurrent decline in time spent on employment-related activities for both men and women in the six states. Furthermore, the gender gap is widening in employment activities, especially for women in rural India, who lose an average of five hours per week of employment activities. This study concludes that people devote a generally consistent amount of time to childcare, with a declining gender disparity in the amount of time spent providing domestic service due to women's weekly time reductions of between four and seven hours.