ERF 27th Annual Conference
Rural Electrification and Empowerment of Women in Rural Iran
No.
ERF27_140
Publisher
ERF
Date
May, 2021
Topic
J1. Demographic Economics
O1. Economic Development
We estimate the causal impact of electrification on fertility and the gender gap in education, two important determinants of women's empowerment in rural Iran. An ambitious program of rural electrification started after the 1979 Islamic Revolution extended electricity to rural areas and enabled rural schools and health clinics to operate. Two decades later, despite enforcement of laws and state policies that set the cause of female empowerment back, the gender gap in education had all but disappeared and fertility had dropped by about 5 births per woman. Using a panel of village-level data we show that access to electricity narrowed the gender gap in literacy but increased fertility. The positive effect of electricity on fertility, which runs counter to many empirical findings, is observed when, for better identification, we switch from difference-in-differences to instrumental variable estimation using village elevation from the sea level. We argue that the IV result is plausible because of the complex ways in which electricity affects the costs and benefits of having children. In particular, its negative effect on fertility arising from a higher opportunity cost of children is weak in the case of rural Iran because there women's market work rarely competes with child rearing.
Research Fellows
Djavad Salehi-Isfahani
Professor, Virginia Tech University
Authors
Sara Taghvatalab
Lecturer of Economics, Christopher Newport University in...