Working Papers

• The Cost of Air Pollution for Workers and Firms, with Hélène Ollivier (submitted) [UPDATED Working paper, December 2025], [webinair français]. Media Coverage: RTL
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  This paper shows that even moderate air pollution reduces economic activity. Using French monthly firm-level data and exploiting variation in PM2.5 exposure driven by changes in local wind direction, we find that a 10% pollution increase lowers sales by 0.23% in the same month and 0.69% the next month. Effects vary by sector and operate through reduced labor supply—with a 1% increase in sick leave—, reduced productivity, and demand responses. Absenteeism explains only 3–4% of the sales decline, highlighting the importance of the other channels. Aligning air quality with WHO guidelines could yield economic benefits comparable to the costs of regulation or to health benefits from reduced mortality.

• The Gender Gap in Carbon Footprints: Determinants and Implications, with Ondine Berland (submitted) [IFS working paper, November 2025]; Media Coverage: The Guardian, France 24, Le Monde, Libération, France 2 JT (min 26), France culture, Alternatives économiques, der Spiegel
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  Climate change mitigation requires understanding differences in individual carbon footprints. We document that women emit 26 percent less than men from food and transport, using detailed consumption data from France. After accounting for socioeconomic characteristics and differences in the scale of consumption, an 8 percent gap remains. Red meat and car use—high-emission goods associated with masculine identity—drive most of the residual gap, suggesting that gender differences in carbon footprints are partly driven by gender stereotypes. As a result, climate policies may affect men and women differently, and their political acceptability could become polarized across gender lines.

Work in progress

• The Human Capital Cost of Air Pollution, with Lucie Gadenne, Bobbie Upton and Rodrigo Toneto

• Building Bike Lanes, Changing Commutes?, with Léa Bou-Sleiman

• A Breath of Fresh Air? Fossil Fuel Electricity Phase Outs and the Long-Run Costs of Chronic Pollution Exposure, with Julia Mink, Hélène Ollivier, Aurélien Saussay and Emeline Lequy-Flahault

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  This project quantifies the long-term economic costs of sustained exposure to ambient air pollution. We construct novel measures of individual lifetime exposure to pollution from French fossil fuel power plants over 1950–2022, accounting for residential mobility. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation generated by a government-led transition to nuclear energy in the 1980s, and subsequent phase-out of coal- and oil-fired power plants, we estimate the effects of early-life and cumulative electricity-related pollution exposure on adult employment, earnings, and health. We find that greater long-run exposure significantly reduces lifetime earnings, with effects partly mediated by adverse health impacts from exposure before age five. The implied benefits from this early French fossil fuel phase-out are substantial: within 80 kilometers of plants, individuals born after 1985 are predicted to earn 2.2 percent higher wages than those born before 1965.

Peer-reviewed publications

Economics journals

• Carbon Pricing and Power Sector Decarbonisation: Evidence from the UK. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), Volume 111, January 2022. [Working Paper], [Lay Summary]. Media Coverage: The Economist, L’Usine nouvelle
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  Decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation is crucial to tackle climate change. Empirically, however, little is known about the effectiveness of existing economic instruments in the power sector. This paper examines the impact of the UK Carbon Price Support (CPS), a carbon tax implemented in the UK power sector in 2013. Relative to a synthetic control unit built from other European countries, I find that emissions from the UK power sector declined by 20 to 26 percent per year on average between 2013 and 2017. The tax operated via three mechanisms: a decrease in emissions at the intensive margin; the closure of some high-emission plants at the extensive margin; and a higher probability of closure for plants already at risk due to European air quality regulations.

• Air Pollution and CO2 from Daily Mobility: Who Emits and Why? Evidence from Paris. (with Philippe Quirion). Energy Economics, Volume 109, May 2022. [Replication package], [Working Paper]. Media Coverage: Actu Environnement
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  Urban road transport is an important source of local pollution and carbon emissions. Designing effective and fair policies tackling these externalities requires understanding who contributes to emissions today. We estimate individual transport-induced pollution footprints combining a travel demand survey from the Paris area with NOx, PM2.5 and CO2 emission factors. We find that the top 20% emitters contribute 75-85% of emissions on a representative weekday. They combine longer distances travelled, a high car modal share and, especially for local pollutants, a higher emission intensity of car trips. Living in the suburbs, being a man and being employed are the most important characteristics associated with top emissions. Among the employed, those commuting from suburbs to suburbs, working at a factory, with atypical working hours or with a manual, shopkeeping or top executive occupation are more likely to be top emitters. Finally, policies targeting local pollution may be more regressive than those targeting CO2 emissions, due to the different correlation between income and the local pollutant vs. CO2 emission intensity of car trips.

Transdisciplinary journals

• Tackling Car Emissions in Urban Areas: Shift, Avoid, Improve. (with Philippe Quirion). Ecological Economics, Volume 213, November 2023. [Working Paper]. Media Coverage (in French) : The Conversation, France Culture
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  Car use imposes costly environmental externalities. We investigate to what extent car trips could be shifted to low-emission modes, avoided via teleworking, or improved via a transition to electric vehicles in the context of daily mobility in the Paris area. We derive counterfactual travel times for 45,000 car trips from a representative transport survey, and formulate modal shift scenarios including a maximum acceptable increase in travel time. For a daily travel time increase below 10 min, 46% of drivers could shift to e-bike – mostly – or public transit – rarely –, with half of them benefiting from a travel time decrease. Such modal shift would reduce daily mobility emissions by 15% and generate annual climate and health benefits worth €125 million. Factors such as living in the far suburbs, being male, or having a high income, are associated with inability to shift modes. Teleworking two days a week could save an additional 5% of emissions. Holding demand for mobility and public transport infrastructure fixed, greater emission reductions require improving cars' environmental performance via a transition to electric vehicles.

• Why investing in new nuclear plants is bad for the climate. (with Luke Haywood and Robert Pietzcker). Joule, Commentary, 1663–1678, August 2023. Media Coverage: Euractiv, PV Magazine, Focus

• The untapped health and climate potential of cycling in France: a national assessment from individual travel data (with Emilie Schwarz, Audrey de Nazelle, Philippe Quirion and Kévin Jean). The Lancet Regional Health - Europe, February 2024. Media Coverage (in French): The Conversation, Le Monde
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  Promoting active modes of transportation may generate important public health and climate mitigation benefits. We assess mortality and morbidity impacts of cycling in a country with relatively low levels of cycling, France, along with associated monetary benefits. We use individual data from a nationally-representative mobility survey conducted in 2019. We conducted a burden of disease analysis to assess the incidence of five chronic diseases and numbers of deaths prevented by cycling, based on national incidence and mortality data and dose-response relationships from meta-analyses. We assessed the corresponding direct medical cost savings and the intangible costs prevented based on the value of a statistical life year. The French adult (20-89 years) population was estimated to cycle on average of 1min 17sec per person per day in 2019, with important heterogeneity across gender and age. This yielded benefits of 1,919 (uncertainty interval, UI: 1,101-2,736) premature deaths and 5,963 (UI: 3,178-8,749) chronic disease cases prevented, with males enjoying nearly 75% of these benefits. Direct medical costs prevented were estimated at €191 million (UI: 98-285) annually, while the corresponding intangible costs were nearly 25 times higher (€4.8 billion, UI: 3.0-6.5). On average, €1.02 (UI: 0.59-1.62) of intangible costs were prevented for every km cycled. Shifting 25% of short car trips to biking would yield approximatively a 2-fold increase in the number of deaths prevented, while also reducing CO2 emissions by 0.257 MtCO2e (UI: 0.231-0.288).

Policy publications

• Exposure to air pollution in England, 2003–23, with Lucie Gadenne, Rodrigo Toneto and Bobbie Upton, IFS Report, December 2024. Media Coverage: The Independent

• The Energy and Climate Crisis Facing Europe: How to Strike the Right Balance, with Julius Andersson, FREE Policy Brief, May 2022

• [in French], Connaître et réduire les émissions polluantes dues au transport routier en Ile-de-France, with Philippe Quirion, Dossiers Mobilités Décarbonées: Enjeux et Solutions, Cerema & Construction 21, April 2021

Resting

• Estimating the Local Air Pollution Impacts of Maritime Traffic: A Principled Approach for Observational Data, with Leo Zabrocki and Marie-Abele Bind [Latest version]
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  We propose a new approach to estimate the causal effects of maritime traffic on air pollution when natural or policy experiments are not available. We apply this method to the case of Marseille, a large Mediterranean port city, where air pollution emitted by cruise vessels is a growing concern. Using a recent matching algorithm designed for time series data, we create hypothetical randomized experiments to estimate the change in local air pollution caused by a short-term increase in cruise traffic. We then rely on randomization inference to compute nonparametric 95% uncertainty intervals. We find that cruise vessels’ arrivals have large impacts on city-level hourly concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. At the daily level, road traffic seems however to have a much larger impact than cruise traffic. Our procedure also helps assess in a transparent manner the identification challenges specific to this type of high-frequency time series data.