Conference Agenda

In March 2020, Luxembourg became the first country to make public transport free. We use this unique setting to evaluate the policy’s impact on carbon emissions. Synthetic difference-in-differences allows us to identify a suitable control group. We use spatial emissions data to construct a panel of NUTS 2 control regions in the EU from 2016 to 2021. Our estimates indicate an average reduction of around 8% in road transport emissions. We account for potential confounders, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, shifts in commuting behaviors and advancements in vehicle technologies. Robustness checks support the credibility of our results.

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the firm-level economic impacts of a Swedish grant program that subsidizes firms’ investments in greenhouse gas emissions-reducing projects. We exploit a discontinuity in the assignment mechanism in the program to estimate the causal effects of climate investment subsidies on investment additionality and firm growth. The analysis combines highly-detailed data on the details of each application with detailed firm-level balance sheet data. Our estimates suggest that the grant scheme led to increases in investment, turnover and the number of employees. The results indicate a substantial crowding-in effect on investment.

Ever more countries consider reducing the cost of public transport to incentivize shifts to more sustainable transport modes. This paper quantifies the welfare effects of a large-scale, nationwide public transport subsidy in Germany - the so-called Deutschlandticket. We pair novel cellphone- and app-based mobility data from several European countries with recent advances in synthetic control methods to examine the impacts on mobility and external costs. Our findings show a persistent increase in train ridership and a substitution away from car travel (number of trips and kilometers driven). We find no evidence for latent demand as total mobility remains constant. The substitution is the largest in cities with high-quality public transit as well as for trips of longer distances. The implied CO2 emission reduction amounts to around 5.4 million tons per year (3.8% of total transport sector emissions). In line with our results on less road traffic, we also find suggestive evidence for reduced air pollution in cities (NO2 concentration), and lower road congestion (travel time per kilometer).

Steep declines in solar PV costs in recent years call into question the need for continued subsidies. We leverage administrative data encompassing the near-universe of domestic PV installations in the UK to assess a zero-interest loan scheme for PV in Scotland. Using a matching with difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the decentralized nature of energy policy in the UK, we show that the loan scheme increased adoptions across all wealth deciles, but especially in the least wealthy localities. Loans are a relatively cost-effective approach to accelerate household PV adoption even in when solar potential is relatively low and to promote equitable access to renewable energy.