TY - JOUR A1 - Brehm, Johannes A1 - Pestel, Nico A1 - Schaffner, Sandra A1 - Schmitz, Laura T1 - From Low Emission Zone to academic track: Environmental policy effects on educational achievement in elementary school JF - Journal of Environmental Economics and Management N2 - Do long-term improvements in air quality influence children’s educational outcomes? This paper investigates the impact of Low Emission Zones (LEZs), which restrict access to designated areas for emission-intensive vehicles, on the educational achievement of elementary school students in Germany. Using school-level data from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, we exploit the staggered introduction of LEZs since 2008 with a difference-in-differences approach. LEZ implementations increase transition rates to the academic track in secondary education by approximately one percentage point, or 2.4 percent. We validate this finding using more aggregated district-level data across all of Germany. Our findings imply sizable educational co-benefits of reductions in air pollution. KW - Low Emission Zones; Air quality; Education; Co-benefits Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2025.103165 SN - 0095-0696 VL - 132 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - aus dem Moore, Nils A1 - Brehm, Johannes A1 - Gruhl, Henri T1 - Driving innovation? Carbon tax effects in the Swedish transport sector JF - Journal of Public Economics N2 - Does a carbon tax stimulate low-carbon innovation in the transport sector? We exploit an environmental tax reform in Sweden that introduced both a carbon and a value-added tax on transport fuels. Synthetic control estimates consistently find that the tax reform caused large and significant increases in low-carbon patents. We provide suggestive evidence that the carbon tax drives the effect while fuel price changes with comparable magnitude did not significantly affect low-carbon innovation. Our findings suggest that salient carbon prices may foster low-carbon innovation more effectively than fuel price elasticity estimates suggest. KW - Carbon tax; Low-carbon innovation; Technological change; Synthetic control; Salience Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105444 SN - 0047-2727 VL - 248 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gruhl, Henri A1 - Brehm, Johannes A1 - Ghosh, Arijit A1 - Breidenbach, Philipp A1 - aus dem Moore, Nils T1 - Adjusting to the New Normal: River Flood Risk and the Real Estate Market JF - Environmental and Resource Economics N2 - Do individuals learn from salient river floods and update their risk perceptions accordingly? We exploit the Western European flood in 2021 to estimate changes in property values across German flood risk regions. Flood-prone areas in proximity to the flood or with higher climate change beliefs experience housing price declines, while we observe no statistically significant effects in other flood risk zones. Our results imply that flood risk discounts in the housing market will not adjust uniformly, which may result in suboptimal capital allocation in areas at risk of future flooding. KW - Flood risk; House prices; Risk updating Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-025-00995-x ER -