Household Electrification, Fertility and Employment: Evidence from the Colombian Censuses

Abstract

This paper examines how household electrification in Colombia altered fertility, women’s work behaviour, and children’s schooling. The two main identification strategies exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the cost of a household electric connection. First, the time-varying distance between a municipality and the nearest hydroelectric dam is assumed to influence electrification rates, but to matter less when a municipality was more likely to have already been connected to the electric grid in 1964. Second, changes in dam distance are used to predict changes in electrification rates in specifications including municipal fixed effects. Household electrification is found to have reduced fertility, and to have increased young children’s schooling, but to have had ambiguous employment effects for women.