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In this paper we investigate the impact of electricity on time-use, labor and human capital outcomes for children and women-spouses. Our analysis consider both household and village-level treatment effects. First, using aggregate data we draw stylized facts regarding the energy-development nexus across the last twenty years in Sub-Sahara Africa. We provide data -driven arguments showing that complementary access to appliances and women empowerment are critical for energy to reach its development potential. In a second part, we quantify the causal relationship between energy, time-use, employment and human capital using a rich and detailed micro-level household survey data from Rwanda. We deal with the endogeneity issue by using a combination of matching and an instrumental variable approach. Matching allows us to carefully choose the control group in a multilevel treatment context (household and village), while the instrument allows to get-rid off unobserved selection bias. Our new instrument is based on the ratio of potential area-to-electrify on potential area of the village under the assumption that households are centered around the road in the village. We show a negative aggregate effect of electricity access at the household level on overall time allocated to chores and a positive effect on overall time allocated to wage job activities. Moreover, the impact of electricity varies across children and spouses. We find strong impact on women propensity to work, and on the number of hours supplied for wage jobs. For children, we find a strong and positive, though insignificant, effect on work propensity and a negative effect on wage-work hours. Among educational outcomes, only repetition seems to be negatively impacted by electricity. This result suggests that accessing electricity is equivalent to a positive shock on household level time endowment which relaxes the usual trade-off between working and studying. Finally, contrasting treatment effects at household and village level reveal a strong spillover effects of electrification which benefits women employment in non-connected households.
