Subjective Probabilistic Expectations, Household Air Pollution, and Health: Evidence from cooking fuel use patterns in India

An increasing number of empirical studies have investigated the determinants of cooking fuel choice in developing countries, where health risk from household air pollution is one of the most important issues. We contribute to this stream of literature by examining individuals’ subjective probabilistic expectations about health risks when using different types of fuel and their influence on cooking fuel usage patterns. We also explore how these patterns, in turn, affect health status. Using data collected from 557 rural Indian households, we find that subjective probabilistic expectations of becoming sick from dirty fuel usage have a negative influence on the fraction of days with dirty fuel usage in the household. The results also show that dirty fuel usage degrades the health of the individual. We then examine the effectiveness of information provision regarding the health risks of dirty/clean fuel usage. Our simulation demonstrates that although the provision of information results in statistically significant changes in the households’ cooking fuel usage patterns and in the individuals’ health status, the changes may be small in size.

Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University

2020-05

English(eng)

technical report

VoR

44

This research was supported by the Research Institute for Environmental Economics and Management (RIEEM), Waseda University [JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16K13364].

Discussion papers / Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/31204