The Double Dividend of New Technologies: Experimental Evidence on Women’s Labor Supply and Biomass Reallocation

Yonas Alem () and Sied Hassen ()
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Yonas Alem: University of Cape Town

No 330, ERSA Working Paper Series from Economic Research Southern Africa

Abstract: We present experimental evidence on the impact of improved cookstoves on household biomass management and women's labor supply in rural Ethiopia. Households were randomly assigned to receive a Mirt improved cookstove---shown to reduce fuelwood consumption by 50\% and indoor air pollution by 90\% under laboratory conditions---or a value-equivalent bag of wheat flour. Fifteen months after distribution, treated households reduced monthly firewood consumption by 35.5\% and saved approximately 156 hours per year in fuelwood collection time. We document a novel resource substitution effect: treated households applied 108\% more animal dung as manure and 135\% more crop residue as livestock fodder, reallocating organic inputs from the hearth to the farm. Women in treated households---who bear near-exclusive responsibility for fuel collection and cooking---were 12.5 percentage points more likely to participate in farming and 27.6 percentage points more likely to engage in poultry and livestock management. We find no significant effects on men's time allocation, confirming that the productivity gains are gender-specific. These results suggest that the social returns to clean cooking technologies significantly exceed their private returns, and that standard cost-benefit analyses omit important productivity gains accruing to women.

Keywords: Improved Cookstoves; fuelwood collection; women's time allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 O12 O13 Q53 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
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Published in ERSA Working Paper Series, September 2026

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