Conference Agenda

Access to electricity is a cornerstone of economic development and a central objective of energy policy. While a growing literature documents average impacts of electrification, less is known about how its benefits vary across households and across stages of human capital accumulation, particularly in settings where access approaches universality. This paper examines the relationship between electrification expansion and school enrollment at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, allowing effects to differ by household socioeconomic status. The analysis focuses on Asia, where recent electrification efforts largely extended access to historically underserved populations, while socioeconomically advantaged households already exhibited high baseline access in both rural and urban areas. Using IPUMS Demographic and Health Surveys, I exploit variation in electricity access across 8 Asian countries, over time, and between urban and rural locations. Electrification is associated with increased primary enrollment among disadvantaged households, consistent with the relaxation of basic household constraints. At the secondary level, electrification raises enrollment broadly across socioeconomic groups, indicating that secondary schooling remains a binding margin even for relatively advantaged families. In contrast, at the tertiary level, electrification is associated with enrollment gains concentrated among high-SES households, suggesting that complementary investments and cumulative advantages shape higher education participation. These findings highlight that the human capital effects of electrification depend critically on baseline access and stage of educational investment. From a policy perspective, they indicate that the distributional impacts of electrification depend not only on access itself, but on how energy infrastructure interacts with existing socioeconomic inequalities and education systems.