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...

Clean cooking fuels promise substantial health benefits for rural households, but almost three billion people continue to rely on traditional biomass for their cooking needs. We explore the role of gender in the adoption of LPG, a clean cooking fuel, in rural India. Given that women are...

The literature on sustainable energy technology sees informational barriers as a major obstacle to technology adoption. In the case of solar home systems, recent studies report positive socio-economic effects on households, but technology adoption remains underwhelming. In collaboration with a...

Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is by far the most popular clean cooking fuel in rural India, but how rural households use it remains poorly understood. Using the 2014-2015 ACCESS survey with over 8,500 households from six energy-poor Indian states, our study reports on results from a...

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...

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...

Rural electrification has advanced rapidly in many developing countries. Under conditions of poverty and weak infrastructure, however, households face a risk of backsliding. Here we use two rounds from the ACCESS survey of rural households in six northern Indian states to explore factors that...