ANNOUNCEMENTS
Developing countries face the dual burden of high levels of indoor air pollution and poor rights for women. Standard unitary models of household behavior fail to account for the impact of intra-household bargaining power on household outcomes. Since women face different health costs from indoor air pollution than men within the household, intrahousehold bargaining can serve as potential constraints on women realizing their preferences. I develop a simple collective household model to elaborate the on the mechanisms through which bargaining power can impact fuel choice. Before 2005, a large majority of the country was governed by the Hindu Succession Act of 1954 which discriminated against daughters by denying them coparcenary rights by birth. Since inheritance falls under the state list under the constitution of India, some states had made amendments at different times and granted women equal inheritance rights. I exploit the exogenous variation created by amendments across time and various Indian states as a quasinatural experiment. I focus on fuel choice at two levels: on the level of what type of fuel is used and how much of expenditure is spent on fuels. I find no evidence of the impact of the reform on the level of adoption. I demonstrate that eligibility for the Hindu Succession Act reduced budget shares of solid fuels by 0.1 percentage points. I observe a similar weak impact on the budget share of education. However, the impact on solid fuels was sufficiently small that I do not observe any corresponding impact on modern fuels. Further, I find no evidence for the impact of amendments on the total land holdings of a household. The impact on solid fuels is implausible unless there exists a second-order effect on bargaining power working through either the labor market, the marriage market, or human capital investment.
Keywords: Intra-household bargaining power, Fuel choice, Hindu Succession Act.
