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Fuel poverty and subjective wellbeing

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  • Awaworyi Churchill, Sefa
  • Smyth, Russell
  • Farrell, Lisa

Abstract

We use 13 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to examine the effect of fuel poverty on subjective wellbeing (SWB) in Australia. We find that being in fuel poverty lowers SWB. When we instrument for fuel poverty using electricity and gas prices, we find that a standard deviation increase in fuel poverty is associated with declines of 0.168–0.458 standard deviations in SWB, depending on how fuel poverty is measured. The general conclusion that fuel poverty lowers SWB is robust to alternative ways of measuring fuel poverty, a suite of estimation approaches and other sensitivity checks.

Suggested Citation

  • Awaworyi Churchill, Sefa & Smyth, Russell & Farrell, Lisa, 2020. "Fuel poverty and subjective wellbeing," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:86:y:2020:i:c:s0140988319304475
    DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2019.104650
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Energy poverty; Fuel poverty; Wellbeing; Life satisfaction;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q41 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Demand and Supply; Prices
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

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