Fracking, farmers, and rural electrification in India

T. Robert Fetter and Faraz Usmani

Journal of Development Economics, 2024, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: The shale gas revolution in the United States induced an unprecedented commodity boom across northwestern India. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India’s national rural electrification scheme, we show that access to electricity increased total employment and non-agricultural employment in villages affected by this exogenous economic shock, but had no impact on labor markets elsewhere. This combination of two natural experiments highlights how complementary economic conditions drive heterogeneity in the labor-market impacts of rural electrification. It also helps explain the large variation in the reported impacts of such resource-intensive infrastructure investments globally.

Keywords: Rural electrification; Employment; Natural experiment; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 O13 O15 O18 Q40 Q56 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824000579
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Fracking, farmers, and rural electrification in India (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s0304387824000579

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103308

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().