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Drastic emission reductions are necessary to combat climate change. However, despite several climate policies, carbon emissions from German manufacturing have actually increased between 2005 and 2017. In this paper, we provide evidence of how the policy mix overall has affected the German manufacturing sector in its entirety. Using detailed administrative micro-data at the product-level, we decompose changes in carbon emissions between 2005 and 2017 into scale, composition (changes in the mix of goods produced) and technology (emission factors of production) effects. We find that much of the increase in carbon emissions is due to an increase in manufacturing's production scale. Relative to the strong output growth, our analysis reveals a clean-up of manufacturing of 9 %. This clean-up is exclusively due to a shift towards a cleaner product composition from 2011 onwards, while production technique has mostly become dirtier. The results display substantial sectoral heterogeneity and are largely driven by the most energy and emission intensive sectors. This version: August 26, 2022

Climate policy often implies increasing energy prices. Due to incomplete regulation across the globe, concerns about their competitiveness and employment effects play an important role in the policy debate. Using micro-data on electricity network charges and the official census data for Germany, we study the impact of rising electricity costs on plant performance in German Manufacturing. Electricity network charges are determined through regulation in Germany and therefore exogenous to manufacturing plants, while making up a substantial share of final electricity prices. Our estimates imply a negative own-price elasticity of electricity of -0.4 to -0.6 in the short-run: A one cent increase in average network charges leads to a decrease in electricity procurement of roughly 3 %. There is suggestive evidence that this elasticity of response is decreasing over time, in line with nonlinearly increasing marginal abatement costs. Generally, we do not find significant effects on revenues, investments or capital stocks.

Recent evidence suggests a positive impact of air pollution on crime in large cities. We provide first evidence on the potential effect of air pollution on criminal activity using a broader set of geographical regions with lower air pollution levels. We use a unique combination of daily crime data with weather and emission records for the states of Baden-Wuerttemberg (BW) and Rhineland-Palatinate (RLP) in Germany from 2015 until 2017. We exploit the variation in air pollution which is attributable to changes in daily wind direction. We find that an increase of one standard deviation of PM10 leads to an increase in crime of 4.6%.

The Mannheim European panel on Financial Indicators and Emissions (ME-FINE) is a new European company-level dataset, combining financial information from Bureau van Dijk's Orbis database with data on pollutant emissions from the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER) and its successor, the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR). The current version of ME-FINE spans from 1998 to 2016 and focuses on companies in the manufacturing and energy supply sectors in the EU-15 plus Hungary and Norway. The dataset covers around 70 percent of observations in EPER and E-PRTR in those sectors and countries, representing about more than half of the emissions of the most common (air) pollutants. [...]

The manufacturing sector accounts for a substantial share of German GDP, employment and carbon emissions. Therefore, the manufacturing sector's energy use and carbon emissions are of crucial importance for reaching Germany's climate goals. In this paper, we analyse energy use patterns in German manufacturing between 2003 and 2014, using rich administrative micro-data. We find that although the manufacturing sector has been faced with rising energy costs as a share of total costs, energy use has not declined except briefly during the economic crisis. We also find that energy intensity in the manufacturing sector has not decreased substantially. In contrast, carbon intensity has fallen slightly between 2003 and 2014. This can be attributed to changes in the fuel mix.

Actinomyces neuii, a species first described in 1994, has proven to be an exception in this genus on account of its aerobic growth, microscopic morphology (no branching), and the types and location of infections. Abscesses and infected atheromas are the most frequent types of infections, followed by infected skin structures, endophthalmitis, and bacteremias, including endocarditis. They are most likely of endogenous origin. To date, approximately 100 cases have been recorded in the literature. Intra-abdominal and intrathoracic infections, however, have not yet been described, and cases of classical actinomycosis seem to be extremely rare. Prognosis has generally been good with antibiotic and/or surgical treatment. Susceptibility to antibiotics has paralleled that of other Actinomyces spp.

We study the effect of a state level mandate on renewable heating technologies on the housing market. The mandate requires a minimum share of 10 % renewable energy sources when changing the heating system in the existing building stock. As renewable energy sources are still more expensive than conventional alternatives this mandate could lower the relative price of homes in the existing building stock when a replacement of the heating system is impending. We implement a two stage difference-in-differences nearest neighbor matching approach to identify the effect on prices taking advantage of differences in regulation by location and vintage of the building stock. Our results find no evidence of an effect of the mandate on housing prices.

Voluntary environmental management programs for firms have become an increasingly popular instrument of environmental policy. However, the literature's conclusion on the effectiveness of such programs is ambiguous, and for the European region there is a lack of evidence based on a large control group. We seek to fill this gap with an evaluation of the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), introduced in 1995 by the European Union as a premium certification of continuous pro-environmental efforts above regulatory minimum standards. It is more demanding than other voluntary programs due to annual public reports of the environmental performance and targets for improvements. We use official firm-level production census data on the German manufacturing sector, a major energy consumer and emitter in Europe. To account for the self-selection of firms, we combine the Coarsened Exact Matching approach with a Difference-in-Differences estimation. Our results do not suggest reductions of firms' CO2 intensity and energy intensity neither before nor after certification. Moreover, program participants do not increase renewable energy consumption or investments into the protection of the environment and climate. Our results are robust to a variety of checks and call into question the effectiveness of the EMAS program concerning these particular outcome variables.