ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY: CROSS-REGIONAL EVIDENCE ON LABOR, HEALTH, AND ENVIRONMENT

The global energy transition has profound implications for environmental sustainability, labor markets, and public health. While renewable energy adoption is widely promoted as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its broader socioeconomic impacts remain contested and uneven across regions. This dissertation investigates how renewable energy consumption interacts with employment, environmental outcomes, and health across diverse economic and institutional contexts. The first study examines the dynamic relationships between renewable energy consumption, industrial employment, and CO2 emissions in the world’s top seven carbon-emitting Countries from 1990 to 2019. Using a PVAR framework with impulse response functions, the results confirm the renewable energy-led emissions reduction hypothesis: increases in renewable energy reduce CO2 emissions over time. However, they also generate short-term declines in industrial employment, reflecting transitional labor market disruptions. The second study turns to Sub-Saharan Africa and explores the links among renewable energy, fossil-based electricity, GDP, CO2 emissions, and maternal mortality from 1990 to 2020. Employing a PVAR model, the findings suggest that renewable energy, dominated by traditional biomass, temporarily lowers maternal mortality and CO2 emissions. Yet these benefits are likely driven by external interventions such as aid programs rather than intrinsic advantages of biomass. The results emphasize the need for modern renewable technologies to achieve durable health and environmental gains in the region. The third study investigates the causal impact of renewable energy use, PM2.5 air pollution, and socioeconomic factors on life expectancy in Eastern and Western Europe from 1995 to 2020. To address endogeneity in pollution and macroeconomic conditions, a two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimator with fixed effects is applied, with Driscoll–Kraay estimates used as robustness checks. The results show that PM2.5 exerts a significant negative causal effect on life expectancy in both regions, with larger magnitudes in Eastern Europe. Renewable energy has a significant direct effect on Western Europe only once instrumented, while GDP is a significant determinant of life expectancy in Eastern but not Western Europe. Taken together, the three studies provide cross-regional evidence that the benefits of renewable energy are multi-dimensional but uneven. The findings highlight the need for integrated strategies that link decarbonization with labor market policies, energy access, and air quality regulation. This dissertation contributes to the literature by demonstrating how renewable energy affects not only emissions but also labor and health outcomes, and by emphasizing the importance of region-specific institutional capacity in shaping transition trajectories.