Rural Electrification and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Nigeria.

Summary Using recent household survey data, this paper investigates how electrification affects female and male labor supply decisions within rural households in Nigeria. Focusing on matched husband-wife data, we propose to consider dependence in spouses’ labor supply decisions and to address adequately zero hours of work using a copula-based bivariate hurdle model. In parallel, we opt for an instrumental variable strategy to identify the causal effect of electrification. Our findings show that such dependence is strongly at work and critical to consider when assessing the impact of electrification on spouses’ labor supply outcomes. Electrification is found to increase the working time of both spouses in a separate examination of their labor supply, while the joint analysis emphasizes only a positive effect of electrification on husbands’ working time. However, whatever the econometric specification, we find no significant effect of electricity on spouses’ employment probability.