presents suggestive evidence for women‘s empowerment and greater role in household decision making in villages with electricity, compared to villages without electricity, in Bangladesh.

One study that has examined these issues using a sampling and estimation approach designed to identify causal effects is ADB (2010). Their survey of rural Bhutan elicited information on women‘s involvement in decision-making. Based on propensity score matching, they found that electricity significantly increased women‘s participation in decisions related to health and education, but not finance. Focus group participants explained ―that access to electricity empowers women through health, education, gender equality, and domestic violence awareness programs on television. Thus, women are becoming more assertive and confident. Further, on average, women save 1.5 hours every day in cooking, which enables them to attend village meetings and voice their concerns.‖ ADB (2010) argues that ―the impact of television as a medium of news and information cannot be overstated. An overwhelming 86.8% of electrified households, and nearly 70% of unelectrified households, agree that television is a good source of news and information.‖ And ESMAP (2004) argues that ―reading and watching TV are significant factors in raising awareness, broadening horizons, and educating rural women and thus should be seen as status-enhancing activities.‖ Thus, the primary story here appears to be about television. It is clear that across cultures, one consistent, immediate impact of electrification is that people spend more time watching television, whether because households buy televisions or because of the decreased cost of watching television previously powered by battery.<sup>50</sup> For example, IEG (2008) found that across countries, electrification explains 20% of increases in TV ownership over time (coefficient = 0.47, statistically significant at 5% level). IEG (2008) further argues that having a television in the home (as opposed to a public place) is particularly important for women‘s access. Many studies report mixed feelings about television, for example, concerns that it takes time away from studying (ESMAP 2002 on the Philippines), that it competes with other potential appliance purchases and electricity uses that would facilitate household chores, e.g., cookstoves and other kitchen implements (Cecelski 2004), that it undermines traditions and encourages migration to urban areas (ADB 2010), and that it undermines social capital (Olkean, 2009, however, found no significant effect on women‘s groups). This parallels broader concerns about the negative impacts of television such as reduced studying time and social interaction within the family, reinforcement of negative stereotypes about women in advertising (Furnham and Mak 1999), ―overconsumption‖ and regret over time spent watching television (Gui and Stanca 2009), and increased obesity resulting from decreased physical activity and increased consumption of unhealthy but heavily advertised foods, both in developed (Marshall et al. 2010, Swinburn and Shelly 2008) and developing (Xu et al. 2007, Morales-Ruán et al. 2009) countries. This literature provides an important caveat regarding the long-term impacts of television on society.

However, the evidence points to positive impacts when television is introduced in rural communities after electrification. There is evidence that access to television improves women‘s standing as measured on several dimensions. Jensen and Oster (2009) find that access to cable television results in lower acceptability of spousal abuse, lower son preference, more autonomy, and greater likelihood of sending young girls to school in rural India.<sup>51</sup> The effects are large: ―equivalent in some cases to about

> 50 Television is one of a broader suite of communication benefits made possible by electrification, including the internet, ability to inexpensively charge cell phones, and lower operating cost and therefore longer hours listening to radio.  However, most qualitative assessments identify television in the home as the most likely to have gender-differentiated impacts, and the empirical impact evaluations identified also focus on television.

> 51 Based on fixed effect (village and individual) regression on cable in village, including interactions between a year indicator and state dummies, income, education, age and age-squared, village population density, electrification status and distance to nearest town. Their estimates are essentially for changes in attitudes and behaviors within a certain person, with the fixed affects absorbing all time-invariant characteristics of the person and the household (such as the type of job held by the husband).  They also examine pre-trends, and find that areas which get cable next year have no apparent changes in attitudes and behaviors this year, supporting their conclusion of causal impacts.

40