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Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events.

Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.

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About this event

The output of household work is rarely observed, particularly for individual members, making gendered comparative advantage difficult to measure. I develop a model-based test using household consumption per minute of domestic work: lower opportunity cost alone cannot raise this measure, whereas productive capacity can. I exploit rainfall-induced variation in household-production demand in rural India to study how such capacity forms. A one-standard-deviation rainfall increase at ages 4?7 raises girls? domestic work at ages 12?17 by 5.3 minutes daily. The estimate for boys is 1.0 minute and insignificant; infancy rainfall has no persistent effect for either gender. Effects concentrate among eldest daughters. Households whose eldest daughter experienced favourable early-childhood rainfall obtain 4?10 percent more consumption per minute, depending on current rainfall. Despite lower study time, I find little evidence of adverse effects on enrolment, grade progression, or measured learning. The results are consistent with early domestic-work engagement building task-specific productive capacity.