Using recent household survey data, this paper investigates how electrification affects
female and male labor supply decisions within rural households in Nigeria. Focusing on
matched husband-wife data, we propose to consider dependence in spouses’ labor supply decisions
and to address adequately zero hours of work using a copula-based bivariate hurdle
model. In parallel, we opt for an instrumental variable strategy to identify the causal effect
of electrification. Our findings show that such dependence is strongly at work and critical
to consider when assessing the impact of electrification on spouses’ labor supply outcomes.
Electrification is found to increase the working time of both spouses in a separate examination
of their labor supply, while the joint analysis emphasizes only a positive effect of electrification
on husbands’ working time. However, whatever the econometric specification, we find no
significant effect of electricity on spouses’ employment probability