Conference Agenda
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Egg-Timer: Climate, Health and Well-Being Location: D-107 Session Chair: Olga Popova, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) | |
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Incidence of Climate Change Heat Impacts and Cooling Adaptation Benefits: Evidence from Italian Households 1: Ca'Foscari University and CMCC, Italy; 2: Boston University Rising temperatures increase households’ demand for thermal comfort and, simultaneously, generate heat-related health harms that may translate into higher out-of-pocket medical spending. This paper studies how these two channels interact in household budgets, by framing air conditioning (AC) as an ex ante shielding technology that mitigates effective heat exposure, while health spending reflects an ex post coping margin once damages materialize. By using multiple waves (2014-2022) of the Italian HBS matched to ERA5 climate data, we estimate a two-stage discrete–continuous framework that: (i) characterizes the drivers of AC adoption (extensive margin); (ii) quantifies how contemporaneous heat shocks affect electricity and health expenditures, and how these gradients are mediated by AC ownership (intensive margin). To address the endogeneity of AC, driven by unobserved thermal preferences, dwelling quality, and latent vulnerability, we implement a control-function strategy based on long-run climate and a novel set of instruments exploiting lagged regional tax credit uptake interacted with household constraints. We confirm that AC ownership increases with long-run heat exposure and income, and is further shaped by age and job-related habits consistent with time-at-home and exposure differences. From the second stage, we find that AC owners exhibit a steeper electricity–heat response: a shock from 0 to 40 WBGCDDs increases electricity bills by about 14% (roughly C7) for AC owners—around 5 p.p. more than comparable non-owners. On the health side, heat raises medical spending but the gradient is partially attenuated by AC: the same 40-degree-day shock is associated with roughly 17% higher health expenditures among non-AC owners versus 12% among AC owners, consistent with incomplete but meaningful shielding. Overall, this suggests that private cooling produces health-cost relief while shifting part of the heat burden onto electricity bills — an adaptation pathway with important distributional and energy-policy implications in a warming and aging country. | |