Conference Agenda

Cooking, a ubiquitous household activity, presents a significant opportunity for energy transition. This study focuses on the transition to the understudied and under-adopted—despite high electricity access—practice of electric cooking as a clean solution by examining both demand and supply factors. Using nationally representative data from India, Nepal, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, we highlight the role of electricity reliability as a central determinant of electric cooking adoption. Reliability consistently shows a strong positive association with adoption in India, Nepal, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, underscoring that access alone is insufficient without dependable supply. Alongside reliability, household expenditure, urban location, and education also emerge as important correlates. Qualitative evidence further reveals that while electric cooking is valued for its speed and convenience, it is predominantly used in a stacked manner and faces several barriers—poor and unreliable electricity quality, inadequate household electrical wiring and infrastructure, high upfront appliance costs, limited appliance durability, and lack of local repair services—that inhibit greater use of this fuel. These findings can be valuable for further research, data collection, and government policies to effectively scale electric cooking.

This paper examines the impact of air pollution (PM2.5) on labor supply in India

with a focus on gender-based differences. Using high-resolution satellite-derived

PM2.5 data and nationally representative employment surveys, we estimate the

impact of short-term exposure to PM2.5 levels on work hours and earnings. We

find that air pollution reduces labor supply with effects varying by gender. While

men experience a temporary decline in weekly hours worked by around one hour

at moderate pollution levels, their labor supply levels off at extreme pollution

levels. In contrast, women experience a continuous decline in both work hours

and earnings as pollution levels rise. Women in urban areas and older women

show greater vulnerability to extreme levels of PM2.5. Higher pollution levels

can emerge as an additional factor contributing to gender disparities in workforce

participation.

The green transition is expected to be one of the most significant forces shaping labor markets. As economies shift toward cleaner technologies, green jobs will expand, while employment in high-emission sectors will either decline or move into other sectors, depending on skill transferability. In this context, the ability of workers to transition between green and non-green jobs will be crucial to ensure a just labor market adjustment. Green transitions remain understudied, particularly in developing economies where data constraints limit empirical analysis. This paper addresses this gap, using household survey data and a synthetic panel approach to estimate the probability of labor transitions employs a skills-based green index. The results reveal a high degree of labor market persistence, explained by the role of skills in shaping mobility, and show a wage premium of 10.6%. These findings have policy implications for ensuring a just energy transition.

We study the link between race and air pollution in Mexico. Combining satellite-based estimates of PM2.5 (1998–2022) with census data on household indigeneity, we compare average annual pollution levels between predominantly Indigenous and non-Indigenous municipalities. Our estimates suggest a persistent conditional exposure gap of more than one microgram per cubic meter. We then decompose this gap by examining the mechanisms that support it, including cooking fuel choice, agricultural burning, industrial siting, and local atmospheric conditions. Mechanism-specific conditional differences indicate that differences in cooking fuel explain up to fourteen percent of the gap, while atmospheric and orographic conditions account for up to forty percent. We posit that these orographic differences relate to the historical displacement of Indigenous populations into rugged terrain, which reduces the planetary boundary layer height and traps pollutants. To our knowledge, this is the first study to connect historical displacement with contemporary environmental justice. Finally, we estimate the health consequences of the estimated gap by calculating differences in the mortality effects of PM2.5 between Indigenous and non-Indigenous municipalities using a control-function approach that instruments PM2.5 with boundary-layer height. Results suggest a higher marginal effect of PM2.5 on mortality in Indigenous municipalities. Policy simulations imply that equating the share of people cooking with bio-fuels between Indigenous and non-Indigenous municipalities could prevent around 120 premature deaths annually, with benefits of up to USD 26 million.