Farmland rental market participation and residential energy consumption: Evidence from rural areas in China

The number of energy consumption in the residential sector experienced a rapid growth trend over the past 40 years, of which residential energy consumption in rural areas was an important reason for the quick growth in energy consumption. With the continuous development of farmland rental market, rural factor allocation effi-ciency and household income were improved in the actual world, which affected residential energy consumption. Thus, the main goal of this paper was to study the impact of farmland rental market participation on residential energy consumption by using a data set that covered 5018 effective samples. And the instrumental variable (IV) approach and the mediation effect model were used to test empirically the impact of farmland rental market participation on residential energy consumption. Compared with the existing studies, the main contributions of this paper were that: (i) a systematic theoretical model for the relationship between farmland rental market participation and residential energy consumption was established, which expanded the research perspective; (ii) the mediation effects of labor migration to urban areas and household income for the relationship between farmland rental market participation and residential energy consumption were analyzed, which enriched the research conclusions. The results indicated that: (i) compared with farm households without renting in land, residential energy consumption and electricity consumption for farm households with renting in land were significantly increased by 12.52% and 9.53%, respectively; (ii) expanding farm size decreased significantly the number of labor migration to urban areas by 16.31%, which boosted residential energy consumption; (iii) expanding farm size increased significantly household income by 7.68%, which raised residential energy con-sumption. This study was conducive to not only enhancing the sustainable economic development, but also expanding and improving the research conclusions of the existing literature.