How do major flooding events impact women’s labor force participation in India?

As climate change increases the intensity of natural disasters, India’s monsoon season and resulting flooding increasingly threaten women’s autonomy. Globally, researchers are concerned that climate events are reversing progress made in women’s labor force participation, especially in low-income or rural areas. Elena Stacy, doctoral candidate in Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE) and fellow through the O-Lab and Energy Institute’s Initiative on Equity in Energy and Environmental Economics, investigates this dynamic in detail in her project: “The Impact of Floods on Women’s Empowerment and Female Labor Force Participation in Rural India in the Age of Climate Change.”

Before beginning her PhD at UC Berkeley, Elena spent time as a Pre-Doctoral Research Assistant with Yale’s Economic Growth Center. There, she worked on a project designed to improve the cost and time-effectiveness of time use surveys, a type of survey module which measures how individuals allocate time towards different activities in a 24-hour period. Elena worked with Rohini Pande in Patna, Bihar, during the summer — India’s rainy season — and was often ankle-deep in water on her walk to work. It was the combination of these experiences that led Elena to consider using time-use data to better understand how women are impacted by climate disasters in India.

Elena’s project stands to explore the relationship between labor outcomes and climate impacts in a rural setting with an emphasis on gender disparities, filling an important research gap: while researchers have studied why women’s participation in the workforce is declining in India, and multiple studies have demonstrated how labor force participation advances women’s autonomy, few studies focus on how climate change complicates this dynamic. Elena’s paper contributes  to this literature by leveraging time use data, which provides new insight into the drivers of low labor force participation among women. “If women are shifting away from labor, what is their time used on instead?” 

To understand how women’s labor force participation is impacted by flooding, Elena cross-references time use data with geospatial data from the NASA MODIS satellite dataset. After converting geospatial images to usable data, she can estimate the severity and timing of flooding in different districts. Because the time use data is collected at different points in the year, it’s then possible to measure how women’s time use changes before and after a major flood event.

Eman Nazir, Undergraduate Research Apprentice

Hayley Lai, Undergraduate Research Apprentice

Through the 2022-2023 academic year, Elena has been conducting this work as part of O-Lab and the Energy Institute’s Initiative on Equity in Energy and Environmental Economics, which pairs graduate student fellows with undergraduate students, who benefit from research experience and graduate student mentorship. During her time as an undergraduate student at Berkeley, Elena spent time as an undergraduate research assistant herself, influencing her participation in the initiative: “My personal experience as an undergrad has definitely played a role in my own desire to be a graduate student mentor, and has also informed my approach in it.” Elena’s undergraduate mentees, Eman Nazir and Hayley Lai, have previous experience advocating for environmental justice and women’s empowerment; Elena described how it was important for her to steward their curiosity in her research questions, and provide plenty of country context, to lay a foundation for their data analysis tasks. Since beginning their partnership in Fall 2022, Eman and Hayley have built on their existing experience with R to tackle more advanced data cleaning tasks, and gained experience working with geospatial data. “They’ve put in a lot of work in terms of understanding the project, advancing their programming skills and conducting research,” says Elena. “I’m lucky to have two great, undergrad women in Econ on my mentee team.”

While Elena is still in the early stages of her project, she’s hopeful that her research will inform meaningful policy impact and spur future research on the intersection of gender and climate change in India. In the short term, as Elena cleans, links, and processes novel data, she intends to share it online, alongside her code, in order to make it more approachable for other researchers to examine the impacts of flooding. In the future, if her work does find that floods and severe climate events are disproportionately shifting women away from labor, she hopes that policymakers will make efforts to alleviate these disparities — for example, by specifically targeting women through the state’s existing government labor program, NREGA, or providing alternative childcare options in the event of school closures.

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Understanding the Distributional Impact of New Electricity Technologies in Senegal

How do different electricity technologies impact the way that we use energy — and how should technological roll-outs be targeted in order to achieve efficiency gains to both customers and utilities? Abdoulaye Cissé, a Ph.D. candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics, has spent his time as a Fellow through O-Lab and Haas Energy Institute’s Initiative on Equity in Energy and Environmental Economics asking these questions.

Cissé’s research aims to better understand the energy and electricity value chain in Senegal, where he was born. Cissé grew up hearing conversations about electricity, and his project was heavily inspired by energy issues his family and community faced at home. "There’s a lot of discussion around electricity that I wound up hearing, a lot of issues I grew up experiencing. If you look at the last two changes of power in Senegal, many would argue that, at least partially, they had to do with electricity shortages being quite significant,” he said. 

After reading a news article in 2020 citing transparency issues around electricity rates and payment structures, Cissé approached Senegal’s state electricity utility, Société Nationale d’Electricité du Senegal — or SENELEC — in the midst of a new technology rollout. With the provision of smart and prepaid meters, customers would now be able to see their real-time energy consumption and price, with the goal of encouraging cost-saving and energy conservation. Meters also report back to the utility company, enabling informed distribution decisions and limiting losses. Cissé is investigating how the roll-out might impact consumers differently. He proposed a research project to examine the project’s welfare implications in detail; SENELEC was responsive and agreed to support his research. For SENELEC, an analysis of the impact of new technologies on electricity use is crucial to the reduction of “technical losses” (for example, electricity lost through transmission, distribution, and measurement systems), as well as non-technical losses (such as unpaid bills) at points of consumption.

To study the impacts of the new metering technologies, Cissé is examining billing and payment records, provided by the state energy utility, to understand how much consumers pay for electricity and whether bills are paid on time. Payment data is then cross-referenced with electricity consumption data, building a consumption and purchase history for 1.7 million customers over ten years. Each piece of billing data is associated with an address, allowing Cissé to cross-reference consumer data with regional and local satellite data estimating different economic variables. Altogether, these data allow Cissé to analyze a variety of predictors for Senegalese electricity consumption and payment, isolating the impact of new technologies on energy use. In particular, the data will help Cissé learn whether - and how - consumer decisions may be changing as a result of the new technologies.

Cissé’s project provides crucial insights on the general economic impact of electrification as well as potential distributional consequences of the rollout of the technology, and the analysis of SENELEC’s data alongside satellite data will allow him to see how the economic gains from electrification may accrue differently across regions and income groups. This is especially important in Senegal, where Independent Power Producers (IPPs) – private companies that generate electricity for sale to SENELEC – are often located in rural areas, yet produce power for urban centers. The costs of power generation in these rural areas can be substantial, and include land clearance, noise pollution, emissions from non-renewable power generation, and spillover effects of power plants on local ecosystems. These impacts burden rural populations, while the benefits of electricity generated accrue more to urban residential and commercial clients. Accordingly, the design of power generation to increase electricity access has distributional impacts that warrant further analysis.

Ella Tyler, Undergraduate Research Apprentice

Analyzing ten years of electricity bills and purchases, across an entire country, is no small feat, and Abdou has benefitted in his work from the support of undergraduate research assistants he is mentoring through the Initiative on Equity in Energy and Environmental Economics. As part of this initiative, Abdou has mentored 4 students, providing research training experience and guidance on careers in environmental policy and research. Ella Tyler, for example, worked with Abdou through the 2021 - 2022 academic year; she brought a strong data science background to the project and used her Python skills to help Abdou with data analysis. At the same time, he offered her training in research methods and helped her set up a job as a Research Assistant in Sierra Leone.

As he enters his fourth year in the Ph.D. program, Cissé is nearing the final stages of his data collection work: combining geocoordinate data from SENELEC with remote sensing data and identifying the economic metrics that make the most sense to consider in his analysis. With funding from O-Lab and the Energy Institute, Cissé also hopes to collect primary data on a subset of households next spring, in order to get to know clients beyond their consumption data and consider more predictors of behavior around electricity consumption and payment.

Cissé is regularly in touch with SENELEC, and hopes to return to the utility with policy recommendations related to the impact of meters on energy demand, how to target roll-outs to different types of customers, and the impact of the meters on the economic conditions of residential and commercial customers. He is optimistic about the potential for his research to inform policy on how to best strategize these investments.

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