Universal access to modern energy services, in terms of access to electricity and to modern cooking facilities, has been recognized as a fundamental challenge for development. Despite strong praise for action and the deployment of large-scale electrification programs and improved cookstove (ICS) distribution campaigns, few studies have shed light on the barriers to, the enablers of and the impacts of access to energy on development outcomes, using rigorous methodologies. This paper reviews this recent strand of research, trying to fill these gaps. We focus on the demand-side and household perspective. Our main outcomes of interest are electricity connection and ICS adoption for the analysis of barriers, time allocation, labour market outcomes and welfare for the impact analysis. We provide evidence of significant wellbeing impacts of electrification, and mixed evidence for cookstoves.JEL classification: O1, O13, Q4, Q48

We estimate the relationship between urban spatial expansion and its socio-economic

In representing urban sprawl, the decline in population and employment density from the city centre to the periphery has been identified as the main character associated with the spatial expansion of built-up areas. Urban spatial discontinuity, which occurs when the urban fabric includes built-up or green areas and a relevant share of vacant spaces, has gained recent attention. In this paper, we use Global Human Settlement Layer data to track urbanisation dynamics in European Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) from 1990 to 2014. We represent urban sprawl as the spatial expansion of FUAs associated with either or both declining population density and increasing built-up area discontinuity. We also consider the association with the demographic trends that have been described as the primary driver of urban spatial expansion. We use configural frequency analysis to explore the local association between the different characters of sprawl. We found evidence that urban sprawl effectively took differentiated forms across European FUAs. Even though FUAs have generally become less dense and more disperse, our results show that the extent of these phenomena appears to be more contained in recent years than in previous decades. Both elements of sprawl characterise FUAs with a shrinking population, confirming the decoupling of urban development policies and demographic trends in cities. The results call for better controlled urban development, favouring compact cities and subjecting land-use changes to a perspective of urban population growth.

We investigate the role of social interaction in technology adoption by conducting a field experiment in neighborhoods of Bamako. We invited women to attend a training/marketing session, where information on a more efficient cooking stove was provided and the chance to purchase the product at market price was offered. We randomly provided an information nudge on a peer's willingness to buy an improved cookstove. We find that women purchase and use the product more when they receive information on a peer who purchased (or previously owned) the product, particularly if she is viewed as respected. In general, we find positive direct and spillover effects of attending the session. We also investigate whether social interaction plays a role in technology diffusion. We find that women who participated in the session, but did not buy during the intervention, are more likely to adopt the product when more women living around them own it. We investigate the mechanisms and provide evidence supporting imitation effects, rather than social learning or constraint interaction.