Pay (for it) as you go: Prepaid energy meters and the heat-or-eat dilemma.

The "heat-or-eat" dilemma, a trade-off typically between food consumption and heating, may elevate public health concerns during the 2022 energy-price crisis. Our paper contributes to the literature by exploring the role of domestic energy prepayment meters (PPMs) in the heat-or-eat dilemma, focusing on the association between PPM use and fruit and vegetable consumption. Using a representative sample of 24,811 individuals residing in Great Britain (January 2019-May 2021), we find robust evidence of lower fruit and vegetable consumption amongst individuals using PPMs, compared to those using post-payment energy bill payment methods. On average, our point estimates suggest that individuals using a PPM consume 2.7 fewer portions of fruit and vegetables per week. Our findings hold when bounding analysis is employed to account for omitted variable bias. Using a suite of IV approaches to further alleviate endogeneity concerns we found that our ordinary least squares results are consistent as opposed to IV models. Further robustness analyses highlight the deleterious impact of PPMs on people's healthy eating habits relevant to the consumption of enough fruit and vegetables. Our results suggest that targeted support for PPM users may have beneficial effects on people's fruit and vegetable consumption patterns.

Fuel poverty and financial distress.

Governments and advocacy groups have drawn attention to the precarious position of those members of society who are unable to attain an adequate level of energy services, i.e. the fuel poor. Concerns have also arisen about the ability of fuel poor individuals to adapt to the hardship recently brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring empirically the link between fuel poverty and financial distress prior to and during the first wave the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on the most recent longitudinal, nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom, Understanding Society (UKHLS, Wave 10, January 2018-February 2020). After correcting for the effects of potential endogeneity in the variables of interest, our results identify a statistically robust relationship between fuel poverty indicators and self-reported measures of current financial distress, with stronger effects for subjective indicators. The fuel poverty indicators however exert only a limited influence on an individual's expectation of their future financial situation. Our analysis of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic also confirms that fuel poverty contributed to financial distress. Our main findings are robust to a suite of specification and sensitivity checks. Our results lead to recommend assessing measures which target fuel poverty on the basis of their potential indirect effect on financial distress.