Factors Influencing Household Cooking Energy Selection And Its Cognitive Health Effects On Resident

Today,China’s air pollution is still in a serious situation,with regional air environment problems featuring pollutants such as fine particulate matter becoming increasingly prominent and damaging the health of residents.For decades,China has been promoting energy transition policies,with household cooking as the main use of household energy.However,the use of solid fuels still accounts for a large proportion of household energy use still.Given the above background,it is important to study the determinants of household cooking energy choices and to further analyze the impact of household cooking energy choices on the health risks of the residents.This dissertation focuses on household cooking energy and investigates the determinants of household cooking energy choice and residents’ cognitive health effects.This dissertation derives the determinants of household cooking energy choice by constructing unbalanced panel data from the 2010-2018 Chinese Family Panel Studies,applying LASSO to select important factors,and using a multinomial logit model to obtain multiple important factor preferences for household cooking energy.This not only solves the problem of multicollinearity and overfitting,but also provides a quantitative basis for policymakers to effectively promote household cooking energy transition,which is a contribution to the existing literature and actual policy making.This dissertation finds that whether the household is engaged in agriculture,household size,living conditions and expenditure are the most important factors in household cooking energy choices.Secondly,in addition to the education level,age and gender of the household head,the health level of the household head and the descendants of the family affects household cooking energy choices.The level of regional economic development,household expenditure and distance from the city are the most important determinants of household cooking energy choice in rural areas.This dissertation also analyzes the effect of household cooking energy choice on residents’ cognitive health and finds that household use of solid cooking energy leads to reduced cognitive ability.This dissertation uses the instrumental variables method and DID method to alleviate the endogeneity problem in the empirical analysis and to compensate for the shortcomings of previous studies.The effects of residents’ cognitive health show significant age,gender,regional,and exercise heterogeneity.Then,this dissertation identifies household work time and cultural,educational,and recreational expenditures as possible mechanism channels.Finally,a "natural experiment" using air pollution control policies find that a clean transition in household cooking energy effectively reduced the effect of indoor air pollution on cognitive ability.Therefore,in order to promote the implementation of the "Healthy China" strategy and China’s carbon emission reduction strategy,and to better maintain the physical and mental health of the residents,it is necessary to further promote the energy transition in household cooking.