Essays on the Drivers and Impacts of Clean Cooking Energy Transitions in India

Abstract

Household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels remains one of the most significant health hazards in low- and middle-income countries. This dissertation comprises three chapters that explore the underlying reasons behind the persistent use of solid fuels for cooking and examines the potential consequences of transitioning to cleaner alternatives. In chapter 1, I study the impact of providing access to clean cooking technology on learning outcomes of children. 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), one of 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. Specifically, a 30 percentage-point improvement in PMUY coverage leads to an improvement in overall learning of approximately 0.1 standard deviations. This effect is comparable in magnitude to the median impact of of some of the most well-known interventions that directly target learning outcomes in developing countries. 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 more regularly. In chapter 2, I explore the link between living in a multi-generational traditional household structure and use of solid fuels for cooking in a patriarchal society. I do this 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 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 solid fuel is lower as well. I provide evidence for this effect to be driven primarily by the father-in-law's preference for food that is cooked in the traditional way without the use of modern equipment. In chapter 3, I examine whether providing information about the health risks of cooking with solid fuels for primary cooks and children can change 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 2000 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. An endline survey conducted 16 weeks later shows that information provision leads to belief updating, especially when the primary cook is informed. Information also transmits within households, both from the primary cook to the household head and vice-versa. However, despite these changes in beliefs, we find no evidence of increased adoption of clean cooking fuels or other mitigating behavior. One likely reason that we find in our analysis is that the changes in beliefs are concentrated among primary cooks with low intrahousehold bargaining power at baseline, who are unable to effect change. Together, the three chapters of this dissertation offer novel and important evidence on the drivers and consequences of cooking with solid fuels. They also make significant contributions to the literature on children's learning, intrahousehold dynamics of decision-making and the role of beliefs in shaping behavior in the context of developing countries.