There are many situations where it is difficult to enforce a social contract. In addition, addressing global problems such as climate change requires collective action. Social capital can help overcome market failure due to the inability to enforce social contract and collective action. However, social capital can be affected by external shocks such as electricity provision in developing countries, but not evident in the literature. This study examines the effect of electricity on social capital, particularly household-level trust, social interactions \& network density. To address the endogenous electricity provision, we estimate bivariate probit model using plausibly exogenous land gradient as an instrument.Our results show that, in short run the effect of electricity on various measures of social capital is not distinguishable from zero. However, we do find some evidence of a heterogeneous effect. Female-headed and electrified households are positively correlated with social interaction and trust. 

This research is in very early stage at the moment. We have completed literature survey and submitted request for the approval conducting survey in India and we are waiting for the approval. 

In this study, we examine how an alternative household energy, biogas affects the times allocated for economic and noneconomic activities and investigate if the biogas has any crowding out effect on household poverty and conservation related outcomes using census and administrative data from Nepal. To account for the nonrandom assignment of biogas, we exploit the limitation of biogas technology that exogenously becomes less feasible at the cutoff of annual ambient temperature of 20 degree Celsius. Our results show that biogas affects the time allocation differently between male and female household members. Female household members spend more time in household production by about two folds than male members. On the contrary, male members allocate more time on market participation by about three folds compare to female members from the same household. We find no positive returns to health. 

The market instruments are effective only if agents (commonly consumers) respond to the price. The market advocates have developed various pricing mechanisms and blocking pricing structures are commonly used price regimes to signal consumption decision, especially by electricity and water utility both in developing and developed countries. Market instruments are also becoming increasingly important instrument to tackle climate change and to achieve the target of 2°C of Paris Agreement. Therefore, understanding whether agents respond to such price regimes has become an important policy question than ever before. On the other hand, studies have also pointed out that households do not pay attention to what electricity price they are paying and their total consumption. Following the seminal work of (Saez, 2010), this study exploits mass around the threshold and infer the behavioral response (in terms of price elasticity) to nonlinear pricing and electricity subsidy, using census of monthly electricity consumption data from Bhutan. The results show that price elasticity of urban households is not significant for any of the sample periods. Similarly, for the pre subsidy rural sample, price elasticity is insignificant and elasticity is close to zero. On other hand, for all the post subsidy rural sample, elasticity is highly significant. However, the price elasticity is small and it ranges from 1.5% to 3.6%.