We estimate the causal impact of school smoking bans in Germany on the propensity and intensity of smoking. Using representative longitudinal data, we use variation in state, year, age cohort, school track, and survey time for implementation of such smoking bans to identify the effects of...

This paper investigates the regional differences in the spread of COVID-19 infections in Germany. A machine learning selection procedure is used to reduce variables from a pool of potential influencing variables. The empirical analysis shows that both regional structural variables and regionally...

Climate change causes natural disasters to occur at higher frequency and increased severity. Using a unique dataset on German banks, this paper explores how regionally less diversified banks in Germany adjusted their loan loss provisioning following the severe summer flood of 2013, which...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

This paper proposes a unified approach to derive sharp bounds on all conventional policy parameters when the instrumental variables (IVs) are potentially invalid. Using a Vine Copula approach, we propose a novel characterization of the identified sets for the marginal treatment effect (MTE) and...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

Climate change causes natural disasters to occur at higher frequency and increased severity. Using a unique dataset on German banks, this paper explores how regionally less diversified banks in Germany adjusted their loan loss provisioning following the severe summer flood of 2013, which...

This paper studies the relationship between climate risk and credit risk. We find a negative correlation between emission levels and default risk once firm's fixed characteristics are taken into account. By breaking down Moody's Expected Default Frequencies (EDFs) into its main components, we...

Epidemics invite “pariah-tization.” By this, I mean the process of stigmatizing one marginalized and impotent segment of society as being the group most vulnerable to the disease at hand- without reliable scientific basis. Doing so allows those in power, the young, the rich, the...

Vlassopoulos et al. (2024) find that after providing two hours of telephone counseling over three months, a sample of Bangladeshi women saw significant reductions in stress and depression after ten months. We find three anomalies. First, estimates are almost entirely driven by reverse-scored...