Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 10th Sept 2026, 07:07:13pm CEST (Norway)
External resources will be made available 30 min before a session starts. You may have to reload the page to access the resources.
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Air pollution 1 Location: Auditorium B: Frøystein Gjesdal Session Chair: Philipp Bothe, Paris School of Economics | |
    | |
Bad for business? The impact of air quality on firm outcomes in Germany 1: University of Basel, Switzerland; 2: University of East Anglia, UK Whereas traditionally, economic output and environmental quality were usually understood as substitutes, recent scientific evidence increasingly points towards a complementary relationship, especially in the context of high pollution contexts. This paper focuses on a developed economy, Germany, and analyzes the impacts of comparatively modest changes of air pollution on plant and firm-level outcomes in the manufacturing sector. Using administrative data from Germany, we analyze the the causal effect of air pollution on a range of plant- and firm-level outcomes, namely production value, revenue, hours worked and salaries paid, allowing us to disentangle productivity and absenteeism effects. Our results imply that air pollution negatively impacts production and revenue in the German manufacturing sector. While findings on hours worked are mixed, our results show that air pollution increases labor costs, particularly for smaller firms, likely due to the need to compensate absences through overtime. Larger firms are likely better able to absorb absences, which is why we observe reduced hours worked for such firms. We can also show that effects of air pollution materialize in the relatively short time frame of individual days. | |