YUYA AIKAWA

Improving environmental quality while sustaining economic growth is an important challenge. Civil liability can give firms incentives to reduce pollution, but whether it improves environmental quality and health, and at what cost to manufacturing, is less well understood. This study examines these questions using evidence from Japan's four landmark pollution lawsuits during the early 1970s. We use difference-in-differences designs to compare changes in the lawsuit prefectures with changes in other prefectures. Using fog days as a proxy for historical air pollution, we find that fog days declined in the lawsuit prefectures over the judgment year and the following ten years. Annual all-cause deaths also declined by an average of 3.9% relative to comparison municipalities over the same period. Manufacturing shows no broad contraction: employment, shipments, and gross value added average 13.5%, 9.1%, and 10.2% higher relative to the comparison group over the same period. These findings suggest that pollution litigation can contribute to environmental and health improvements while maintaining manufacturing activity by encouraging firms to undertake pollution abatement and process change.

In sub-Saharan Africa, traditional biomass cooking imposes substantial health and time costs on women, yet the role of women's bargaining power in cleaner-fuel adoption remains unclear. Using three waves of the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (2008-2022), we estimate the effect of women's bargaining power on households' choices among biomass, transitional, and modern clean fuels. To address endogeneity, we instrument a household decision-making index with wives' attitudes toward intimate partner violence. We find that greater bargaining power shifts households toward cleaner cooking fuels-primarily from firewood to charcoal among poorer households and from firewood to LPG among wealthier households. These findings suggest that women's bargaining power is an important factor to consider alongside policies that expand access to clean cooking fuels.