Designing Financial Protection against Heat Exposure for Gig-workers: Evidence on Timing, Certainty, and Repayment

Extreme heat poses significant risks to the health, earnings, and labor supply of low-income gig workers, particularly in settings with limited access to formal risk-coping mechanisms. This study evaluates whether timely access to liquidity—through forecast-contingent cash transfers and zero-interest credit—enables workers to better adapt to heat stress. We conduct a randomized controlled trial among 1,200 two-wheeler delivery workers in Delhi NCR during the peak summer months of 2026. Workers are individually randomized into six groups: a control group receiving heatwave information only, and five treatment groups receiving information combined with either general-purpose credit, heat-contingent credit of varying amounts, or automatic cash transfers triggered by heatwave events.

Interventions are linked to heatwave forecasts issued by the India Meteorological Department, with financial support delivered at the onset of heatwave episodes or made accessible during predefined windows. Using high-frequency panel data collected through weekly surveys and administrative transaction records from a fintech partner, the study estimates the impact of these interventions on labor supply, earnings, financial behavior, and health outcomes. The empirical strategy exploits both cross-sectional treatment variation and temporal variation in heat exposure, including interaction effects between treatment assignment and heatwave days.
This study contributes to a growing literature on climate adaptation and financial inclusion by testing whether liquidity-based instruments—delivered in real time and conditional on environmental shocks—can improve worker welfare and enable safer, more optimal labor supply decisions under extreme heat.