Job Market Paper

Cooking Less, Working More? Household Fuel Transitions and Female Labor Force Participation in Rural India
Using the India Human Development Survey panel (2004–05 and 2011–12), I estimate the causal effect of household cooking fuel transitions on female labor force participation in rural India. I classify households into solid-fuel, mixed-fuel (fuel stacking), and modern-fuel groups and estimate the effect of each transition with a multivalued-treatment difference-in-differences design. Switching from mixed to modern fuels raises female participation by 9.5 percentage points, while moving from solid to mixed fuels lowers it by 2.6 points. Modern fuels reduce fuel collection time and shorten daily cooking hours. The positive effect is driven by SC/ST women, consistent with a time-saving channel, while the negative effect is concentrated among non-poor, upper-caste, and married women, consistent with income and bargaining channels. The findings inform the design of India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana LPG program.

Publications

Shifting Hours: Time Allocation and Gender Inequality in India, 1999–2019
with Mehtabul Azam
Applied Economics, forthcoming
Using two waves of India’s Time Use Survey (1998–99 and 2019) from six states and Blinder–Oaxaca and Juhn–Murphy–Pierce decompositions, we find that the rise in leisure and the fall in employment are driven mainly by within-group change rather than demographic composition. Rural women’s employment time fell steeply, through both exit from work and shorter hours, while urban women’s was essentially unchanged. Domestic work remains overwhelmingly a female responsibility.

Time-Saving Appliances and Educational Pitfalls: Evidence from Pakistan
with Fareena Noor Malhi and Hashibul Hassan
Energy Economics, 2025
Using village-level appliance ownership among households without school-age children as an instrument, we find that owning refrigerators and washing machines reduces school dropout in rural Pakistan by 17 percentage points and increases years of schooling by 1.62 years. The effects are much larger for girls: dropout falls by 43 percentage points and schooling rises by 2.76 years.

Does the Belt and Road Initiative Boost Chinese Automobile Exports? A Staggered Adoption Approach
with Bidisha Lahiri
Applied Economics, 2024
Using heterogeneity-robust staggered difference-in-differences, with instrumental variables and matching to address selection, we find that China’s automobile exports to Belt and Road partner countries almost doubled after they joined, and net exports rose by about 59%. The effect is stronger for lower-income partners.

Does Access to Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) Reduce the Household Burden of Women? Evidence from India
with Mehtabul Azam
Energy Economics, 2023
Using India’s Time Use Survey and a leave-one-out village instrument, we find that using LPG as the main cooking fuel reduces rural women’s cooking time and increases their employment time by about 6.7 minutes per day, against an average of 84.6 minutes. The effects are driven mostly by married women.

Selected Working Papers

Are Rural Labor Markets Complete? Evidence from Vietnam’s Agricultural Households, 2006–2014
with Tuan Ho
Under review at Labour Economics
Draft available upon request

Time-Saving Appliances and Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from Rural Pakistan
Under review at Review of Economics of the Household
Draft available upon request

The Efficiency of Firms in Indian Manufacturing: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis
Under review at Small Business Economics

Works in Progress

Time Allocation Trends and Child Labor
with Harounan Kazianga and Eric Gonzalez Sanchez

Does She Hire Her? Female Managers and Women’s Employment

Natural Disasters and Corporate Governance: The Impact on Executive Compensation Evidence from Firms in the United States
with Heng Wang and Andrew Schwartz