It is widely accepted that the costs of under-pricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors - transport...

We study the effects of a large car scrappage scheme in Germany on new car purchases and local air quality by combining vehicle registration data with data on local air pollutant emissions. For identification we exploit cross-sectional variation across districts in the number of cars eligible...

Spatial distribution and leakage effects are of great policy concern and increasingly discussed in the economics literature. Here we study Europe's most aggressive recent air pollution regulation: Low Emission Zones are areas in which vehicular access is allowed only to vehicles that emit low...

Air pollution was severe in many urban areas of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, in part due to the burning of bituminous coal for heat. We estimate the effects of this bituminous coal consumption on mortality rates in the U.S. during the mid-20th century. Coal...

Disparities in cross-city pandemic severity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic remain poorly understood. This paper uses newly assembled historical data on annual mortality across 438 U.S. cities to explore the determinants of pandemic mortality. We assess the role of three broad factors: i)...

Although industrial plants, known as Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) sites, exist in every major city of the United States releasing billions of pounds of toxic substances annually, there is little evidence about how these pollutants might harm child development and children's long run outcomes....

Though there is clinical evidence linking pollution induced inflammatory factors and major depression and suicide, no definitive study of risk in the community exists. In this study, we provide the first population-based estimates of the relationship between air pollution and suicide in the...

Historically coal has offered both benefits and costs to urban areas. Benefits include coal's role in fueling industry and thus employment. The primary costs are air pollution and its impact on human health. This paper starts by using a Rosen-Roback style model to examine how differences in...

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic as a natural experiment to examine whether air pollution affects susceptibility to infectious disease. The empirical analysis combines the sharp timing of the pandemic with large cross-city differences in baseline pollution measures based on coal-fired...