Conference Agenda

Polluting solid cooking fuels not only jeopardizes the health of household members but also increases direct household carbon emissions. Since cooking is gender-specific, women are burdened with higher time and health costs and thus show a more pronounced preference for cleaner cooking fuels. Therefore, we explore the impact of women's empowerment on household cooking fuel choice and switching. First, a Nash bargaining model is constructed based on the perspective of intra-household resource allocation, and the impact of women's empowerment on household cooking fuel cleanup transitions is derived theoretically. Further, using panel data from the China Family Panel Studies for 2014-2020, a women's empowerment index for Chinese families is constructed by integrating the empowerment levels of wives and husbands in terms of three dimensions: intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, and collective agency. On this basis, the impact of women's empowerment on household cooking fuel choice and switching is empirically examined using the IV-Probit model. The study shows that women's empowerment significantly contributes to households' choice and transfer to cleaner cooking fuels, mainly in terms of a shift from solid fuels to natural gas. These findings hold after a series of robustness checks. At the same time, the impact of women's empowerment on household cooking fuel choice and switching varies with individual, household, and geographical characteristics. In addition, women's empowerment improves the overall health of household members and reduces the direct carbon emissions of households by promoting the choice of cleaner cooking fuels. This paper offers new insights into promoting the transition to cleaner household cooking fuels, providing empirical evidence to guide gender equality efforts and contribute to the structural transformation of energy consumption.

This study illuminates bycatch species with commercial values in Japan’s purse seine fishery. In 2023, large-/medium-scaled purse seiners in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea introduced individual quotas (IQ) for horse mackerel and chub/blue mackerel. Owing to migration patterns, chub/blue mackerel, which has a commercial value, are often caught together with horse mackerel. We first conceptualize why bycatch species with commercial values could constrain the use of IQs for other targeted species more severely. Using the panel data on daily catches and IQ usage rates at the fleet level, we then empirically show that the tighter the IQ for chub/blue mackerel, the more constrained the catch of horse mackerel. Combining a correlated random effects Tobit model with control function approach, we show that an increase in the IQ usage rate for chub/blue mackerel reduces daily catches of horse mackerel, leading to underutilization of IQs for horse mackerel.

Firewood use and its attendant health and environmental implications remain a concern in developing and higher-income economies and is an especially acute problem in Chile. In this paper, we ask: Can policies that raise firewood costs improve the pollution externalities of the widespread use of firewood? We estimate the causal effect of firewood prices on consumption using forest cover as an instrument for prices. We use a novel dataset of municipal firewood consumption and prices linked with satellite-based forest cover data and climatic and socio-demographic characteristics. We use a two-sample instrumental variable strategy to solve data limitations, using a lagged distance-weighted measure of forest cover to instrument firewood prices. Our results show that if new legislation increases firewood prices by 10%, consumption would decrease by 6.7%, Kerosene and electricity consumption would increase, and the direct yearly reductions in PM2.5 emissions would decrease between 3 and 67 thousand tons.

The literature on action-based agri-environmental and climate programmes suggests that targeted schemes are generally more effective than uniform approaches in achieving environmental goals. This study evaluates the impact of a unique nitrogen regulation in Denmark, which integrates spatial targeting with an innovative incentive structure, on farm-level nitrogen use and crop gross revenue. Employing an instrumental variable two-way fixed effects (IV-TWFE) approach, the findings reveal that the programme reduces nitrogen leaching by 15.5 to 24.4 kg N/ha on average. The effects, however, differ markedly across farm types and by the level of regulation intensity, while no significant impact on crop revenue is observed.