Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Egg-Timer: Climate Policy and Public Acceptance Location: D-110 Session Chair: da Costa Pascal, Laboratoire Genie Industriel, SERG, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette | |
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Beyond Population Growth: How Fertility Shapes Household Carbon Footprints University of Michigan, United States of America While fertility decline’s climate implications spark considerable discussion, causal evidence on the fundamental relationship between fertility and emissions remains limited. I examine how household composition, an underexplored aspect in environmental economics, affects carbon footprint through consumption pattern changes. I document a concave relationship between household carbon footprint and the number of children using the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. Using instrumental variables based on twin births and same-sex sibling composition, I find that an additional child increases household carbon emissions by only about one-sixth of average per-capita emissions. This small effect emerges from economies of scale through two channels. First, while carbon-intensive expenditures rise with additional children, household consumption sharing makes proportional scaling inappropriate. Second, families with more children substitute away from some carbon-intensive expenditures such as air travel. I formalize the carbon footprint impact of household composition through a household consumption model. Back-of-the-envelope calculations using empirical estimates suggest that ignoring household composition leads to a 22% overestimation of lifetime emission reductions resulting from fertility decline. Meanwhile, decarbonization can achieve far larger reductions (36–69%) in lifetime emissions compared to household composition effects. These results underscore the importance of considering household composition in climate policy design, particularly for carbon pricing and fertility-related interventions. | |