Non-electrified people in Africa, still more than 500 million today, have been using kerosene and candles for their lighting purposes for decades. The lighting quality of these sources is low and in particular kerosene usage is associated with harmful soot emissions. Alleviating this grievance...

More than 3 billion people use wood fuels for their daily cooking needs, with detrimental health implications related to smoke emissions. Global initiatives to disseminate clean cooking stoves emphasize technologies that are either expensive, such as electricity and gasifier stoves, or for which...

Smoke from cooking in the kitchen is one of the world's leading causes of premature child death, claiming the lives of 500,000 children under five annually. This study analyses the role of outdoor cooking and the prevalence of respiratory diseases among children under five years by means of...

Climate change poses several risks to the value of financial assets and financial stability. The study conducted in this paper focuses on the German banking sector and estimates its exposure to climate risks arising from a transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Our analysis identifies the...

A large proportion of local pollutants originating from the road transport sector is generated during the so-called cold-start phase of driving, that is, the first few minutes of driving after a car has stood inactive for several hours. Drawing on data from the German Mobility Panel (MOP), this...

Household air pollution from biomass cooking is the most significant environmental health risk in the Global South. Interventions to address this risk mostly promote less-polluting stoves and clean fuels, but their diffusion proves difficult. This paper assesses the potentially complementary...

In 2017, the German federal government passed the Railroad Noise Protection Act to reduce the noise emitted by freight trains. This paper evaluates the effects of this law on house prices by using regional variation comparing affected homes close to train tracks and homes in greater distance...

Low Emission Zones (LEZs) reduce local air pollution by restricting emission-intensive vehicles from accessing designated areas and have been shown to improve population health. Little is known about the effects of driving restriction policies on other areas of life. This paper studies the...

Air pollution has become an increasing health threat for the local population in many cities around the world. Using high resolution remote sensing data on nightlights and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) for the years 1998-2013, I study the contemporary nexus between city shape and air pollution...

To evaluate the causal impact of noise exposure on housing prices, we exploit a sudden and massive reduction in flight traffic that occurred with the onset of the Covid-19 measures in Germany. Comparing locations differently exposed to pre-pandemic noise with a differencein-difference approach,...