Conference Agenda

This study examines how mine size shapes the local economic impacts of coal mine closures in China. Leveraging granular information of 7,006 coal mines and nighttime light data, we implement staggered difference-in-differences and instrumental variable strategies to identify causal effects and document sharply divergent results: while the closure of large mines diminishes local prosperity, the closure of small ones unexpectedly increases nighttime light intensity. The positive outcome following small mine closures is driven by not only top-down special fiscal support, but also bottom-up land use change, informal social support embedded in clan networks, and a higher efficiency of coal enterprise exit. Beyond mine size, we also highlight the need for context-specific transition policies for resource-dependent and poor regions, historically significant mines, unprepared closures, private-owned mines, and mines operated by nonlocal enterprises. Further micro-level analysis reveals that large mine closures disproportionately reduce income and increase unemployment risk among females. Overall, our mine size-based evidence shows that coal mine closures produce systematic winners and losers; thus, a context-differentiated rather than one-size-fits-all policy design is needed to reduce economic loss during the process of coal phase-out.

This paper examines how gender norms shape the labor market response to climate shocks in Egypt, using four waves of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (2006–2023) matched with high-resolution temperature data. Exploiting exogenous variation in subdistrict temperature deviations from historical means, I document three findings. First, climate shocks widen the gendered employment gap: a one degree Celsius increase in temperature deviation raises male labor force participation by about 0.9 pp while reducing female participation by 1.6 pp, with women exiting the labor force entirely rather than transitioning into unemployment. Second, this exit is not driven by differential occupational heat exposure; the female differential is strongest in low-exposure current employment categories, pointing to household-level mechanisms. Third, the moderating role of norms is heterogeneous. Perceived societal norms, capturing the external image of female employment and marriageability, have no significant influence on the female climate penalty. In contrast, more egalitarian intra-household gender norms attenuate it. The findings suggest that climate change may exacerbate gender inequalities in labor markets governed by restrictive household norms, with implications for climate adaptation policy in developing economies where intra-household bargaining, rather than public perception alone, mediates women’s economic resilience.

This paper studies whether environmental policy fosters green consumption

and whether this demand-side transmission depends on the distribution

of income. We construct a cross-country measure of household expenditure on

Environmental Goods and Services (EGS) for 34 countries over 1995–2019 and

compare green consumption with brown consumption. Green consumption is

substantially more income-elastic than brown consumption, suggesting that

demand for EGS remains closely tied to purchasing power. Non-market environmental policy is associated with a stronger response of green than brown

consumption, consistent with a composition effect within household demand.

This response is stronger when a larger share of income is received by the

top 10 percent, while a higher bottom 50 income share does not mechanically

strengthen green demand. Accounting simulations show that these distributional

margins shape the green–brown policy differential. A validation exercise

using consumption-based emissions further indicates that the policy response

is not associated with a large emissions-weighted expansion of demand. Overall,

the findings indicate that the strength of the demand-side response to

non-market environmental policy depends on where income is located in the

distribution.

Clean cooking represents an important pathway through which households in Sub-Saharan Africa can contribute to environmental sustainability and improve health outcomes. However, both adoption and sustained use of clean cooking technologies remain limited. While existing studies document barriers to initial adoption, less is known about how household-level financial shocks affect the ability to sustain clean cooking practices and whether such shocks lead households to revert to traditional cooking methods. This paper addresses this gap using panel data from the Nigeria General Household Survey–Panel, covering Wave 4 (2018/2019) and Wave 5 (2023/2024). We apply a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of financial shocks experienced between survey waves on clean cooking outcomes. The results indicate that households exposed to financial shocks are significantly less likely to sustain the use of clean cooking technologies and are more likely to revert to traditional cooking fuels, with particularly strong effects among rural households. These findings suggest that policies aimed at promoting clean cooking should move beyond access and initial adoption to address affordability and resilience over time. In particular, policies that reduce upfront cash requirements such as smaller LPG refill options or pay-as-you-go systems, may help ease short-term liquidity constraints and reduce the likelihood of reversion among low-income households.