In the absence of first-best climate policy, energy efficiency has figured prominently among strategies to reduce carbon emissions. One of the most sought-after green certification in the building sector is the internationally recognized Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED). This...

Assuming decreasing returns to education and the endogenous supply of qualified and non-qualified labour it is shown to be efficient to supplement a consumption tax with positive incentives for education. If the return from education is isoelastic and if the choice is between (i) subsidizing the...

This paper offers a new argument for why a more aggressive enforcement of minor offenses ('zero-tolerance') may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both minor offenses and more severe crime. We develop a model of criminal subcultures in which people gain social status among their peers...

I document negative externalities of air pollution in the Indian agricultural sector. Using variation in pollution induced by changes in wind across years, I show that higher levels of pollution lead to decreased agricultural productivity, with large changes in productivity being common. The...

The private vehicle is, for most developed countries, the prevalent commuting mode of workers, and one of the main source of CO2 emissions. The choice of the mode of transport for commuting trips clearly depends on individual preferences, and it may be that pro-environmental attitudes and values...

We estimate the impact of temperatures on work-related accident rates in Italy by using daily data on weather conditions matched to administrative daily data on work-related accidents. The identification strategy of the causal effect relies on the plausible exogeneity of short-term daily...

Differential access to health care is commonly cited as a source of heterogeneity in the health effects of environmental exposure, yet little causal evidence exists to support such claims. We test this hypothesis by utilizing exogenous variation in both access to health care and environmental...

This paper studies health effects from restricting the access of high-emission vehicles to innercities by implementing Low Emission Zones. For identification, we exploit variation in the timing and the spatial distribution of the introduction of new Low Emission Zones across cities in Germany....

Environmental policies may have important consequences for firms' competitiveness or profit-ability. However, the empirical literature shows that hardly any statistically significant effects on firms can be detected for the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We explain why there...

This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii)...