Subjective risk belief function in the field: Evidence from cooking fuel choices and health in India
Hide-Fumi Yokoo,
Toshi Arimura,
Mriduchhanda Chattopadhyay and
Hajime Katayama
Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 161, issue C
Abstract:
We investigate the accuracy of the perceptions of health risks in India. The context of our study is the risk of developing physical symptoms related to household air pollution caused by cooking. Using field data collected from 588 respondents in 17 villages in West Bengal, we regress the probability of symptoms on fuel choices to predict respondent-specific health risk changes. The estimated risks, which we treat as objective risks, are then compared with the corresponding subjective probabilistic beliefs, which are elicited by an interactive method with visual aids. Our results show that, on average, the respondents slightly underestimate the change in risk when switching from cooking with firewood to cooking with liquefied petroleum gas, even though their beliefs are qualitatively correct. The results further show that risk misperception is associated only with religion among individuals’ observed characteristics, suggesting that their unobserved characteristics play a substantial role in risk misperception.
Keywords: Belief; Cooking fuel choice; Health risk; India; Risk misperception; Subjective probabilistic expectation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822001420
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Subjective risk belief function in the field: Evidence from cooking fuel choices and health in India (2021) 
Working Paper: Subjective risk belief function in the field: Evidence from cooking fuel choices and health in India (2020) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:161:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822001420
DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.103000
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig
More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().