Conference Agenda

Access to electricity is a cornerstone of economic development and a central objective of energy policy. While a growing literature documents average impacts of electrification, less is known about how its benefits vary across households and across stages of human capital accumulation, particularly in settings where access approaches universality. This paper examines the relationship between electrification expansion and school enrollment at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, allowing effects to differ by household socioeconomic status. The analysis focuses on Asia, where recent electrification efforts largely extended access to historically underserved populations, while socioeconomically advantaged households already exhibited high baseline access in both rural and urban areas. Using IPUMS Demographic and Health Surveys, I exploit variation in electricity access across 8 Asian countries, over time, and between urban and rural locations. Electrification is associated with increased primary enrollment among disadvantaged households, consistent with the relaxation of basic household constraints. At the secondary level, electrification raises enrollment broadly across socioeconomic groups, indicating that secondary schooling remains a binding margin even for relatively advantaged families. In contrast, at the tertiary level, electrification is associated with enrollment gains concentrated among high-SES households, suggesting that complementary investments and cumulative advantages shape higher education participation. These findings highlight that the human capital effects of electrification depend critically on baseline access and stage of educational investment. From a policy perspective, they indicate that the distributional impacts of electrification depend not only on access itself, but on how energy infrastructure interacts with existing socioeconomic inequalities and education systems.

As China undergoes rapid demographic aging alongside a nationwide energy transition, elderly empty-nest households, particularly those in rural areas with limited income sources, may face growing challenges in maintaining affordable access to modern energy. Yet existing studies often treat the elderly as a homogeneous group, overlooking within-group disparities. Drawing on five waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011-2020), this study classifies households into empty-nest, mixed-age, and younger categories to examine patterns of energy burden, with a focus on urban-rural and regional heterogeneity. Using a two-way fixed-effects model, the analysis finds that elderly empty-nest households face an average energy burden 2.6 percentage points higher than other household types (p < 0.01), with gaps of 2.0 percentage points in urban areas (p < 0.01) and 3.1 percentage points (p < 0.01) in rural areas. Across climate zones, the energy burden of elderly empty-nest households is higher than that of other age groups in the cold, hot-summer–cold-winter, and hot-summer–warm-winter zones, while no notable difference is observed in the severely cold and temperate zones. A Shapley decomposition is used to assess the relative contribution of explanatory variables and indicates that empty-nest status accounts for the largest share of observed variation in energy burden. To further investigate underlying mechanisms, two alternative definitions of energy burden are compared, one based on the ratio of energy expenditure to household income and the other on the ratio of energy expenditure to total household expenditure. Results suggest that the income-based measure primarily reflects affordability constraints in rural areas, whereas the expenditure-based measure captures consumption rigidity in modern energy use in urban households. These findings underscore the importance of recognizing intra-elderly heterogeneity in energy-related policy.

The decarbonization of residential heating and transport requires widespread adoption of climate-friendly technologies such as heat pumps and electric vehicles. As efforts to price emissions from these sectors ramp up, differences in the propensity and speed with which households switch to green substitutes will have immense distributional consequences. In this article, I argue that inequality in the `capacity to switch’ is central to the fairness of climate policy in consumer-focussed sectors. Importantly, households' `capacity to switch' is often constrained by factors outside their control, including market failures such as under-provision of transport infrastructure or split incentives in rented housing. I argue that fairness principles should be sensitive to these non-responsible factors. This would require abandoning fairness conceptions predicated on `equality of outcome', such as vertical and horizontal equity, in favour of `equality of opportunity' in reacting to carbon pricing. Building on luck-egalitarian theories of justice, I outline how such an approach can be operationalised and tested empirically. The article concludes by showing how this perspective can inform the design of equitable climate policies.