PROJECT MANAGER: Aline Bütikofer

PROJECT DURATION: 2026-2029

Harmful levels of air pollution are both pervasive and unevenly distributed, leaving low-income families more vulnerable to the health threats of air pollution. Climate change is expected to worsen air quality and widen the gap in pollution exposure between rich and poor people, thereby increasing inequality in health. Contrasting the growing urgency is our lack of a systematic understanding of the distributional effects of pollution exposure on health. PHINE will open new frontiers in our knowledge of how pollution affects health inequalities and how to design efficient environmental policies that address distributional effects. Its main objective is to establish a groundbreaking framework that identifies the underlying causes of heterogeneity in policy effects, incorporating unequal pollution exposure, sensitive periods, cumulative exposure, and nonlinearities in the relationship linking pollution and health. By studying globally relevant policies and an encompassing range of pollution and health measures, PHINE provides a big leap forward in our understanding of the distributional effects of environmental policies on health. PHINE will draw upon and extend methods at the research frontier to provide a comprehensive picture of the distributional policy effects.

The project will combine granular pollution measures with administrative income and health records and introduce a novel combination of empirical strategies—a moversʼ design and a difference-indifferences design—to disentangle the effect of age of exposure from the duration of exposure. Hence, PHINE will develop a new strategy with the clear potential to transform research on the malleability of human capital. In summary, PHINE not only represents a significant advancement in a research area of growing importance, but it will also impact policy by generating essential insights on two of the most urgent topics on Europeʼs political agenda—environmental degradation and inequality.