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Background COVID-19 is a lung disease, and there is medical evidence that air pollution is one of the external causes of lung diseases. Fine particulate matter is one of the air pollutants that damages pulmonary tissue. The combination of the coronavirus and fine particulate matter air pollution may exacerbate the coronavirus’ effect on human health. Research question This paper considers whether the long-term concentration of fine particulate matter of different sizes changes the number of detected coronavirus infections and the number of COVID-19 fatalities in Germany. Study design Data from 400 German counties for fine particulate air pollution from 2002 to 2020 are used to measure the long-term impact of air pollution. Kriging interpolation is applied to complement data gaps. With an ecological study, the correlation between average particulate matter air pollution and COVID-19 cases, as well as fatalities, are estimated with OLS regressions. Thereby, socioeconomic and demographic covariates are included. Main findings An increase in the average long-term air pollution of 1 μg/m 3 particulate matter PM 2.5 is correlated with 199.46 (SD = 29.66) more COVID-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in Germany. For PM 10 the respective increase is 52.38 (SD = 12.99) more cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The number of COVID-19 deaths were also positively correlated with PM 2.5 and PM 10 (6.18, SD = 1.44, respectively 2.11, SD = 0.71, additional COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants). Conclusion Long-term fine particulate air pollution is suspected as causing higher numbers of COVID-19 cases. Higher long-term air pollution may even increase COVID-19 death rates. We find that the results of the correlation analysis without controls are retained in a regression analysis with controls for relevant confounding factors. Nevertheless, additional epidemiological investigations are required to test the causality of particulate matter air pollution for COVID-19 cases and the severity.

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There is a new wave of interest in the inequality of income and wealth in the social sciences as well as in physics. On the top of the list are persons who own assets of US dollar 1 billion and more. Not much is known quantitatively of the distribution of these persons among countries. In this paper, it is analyzed empirically whether more capitalistic countries, as measured by index variables of economic freedom, exhibit a systematically larger number of billionaires in the year 2012 than less capitalistic countries. The main result is that the typical economic freedom indicators do not play a statistically significant role with respect to the number and wealth of billionaires, except the protection of property rights. In addition to that, according to further empirical results of the paper, billionaires may not be economically harmful for the respective countries as their existence, number and wealth is positively correlated with the GDP per head.

The present paper explores the impact of an intergenerational externality on private fertility decisions, under a pay-as-you-go social security system. The analysis is performed in the framework of a steady state growth model, with overlapping generations. To explain why households have children, altruism between parents and children is assumed. Surprisingly, the effects of altruism are not symmetric. The private fertility decisions are optimal only if children ,,love" their parents, because children then make private transfers at exactly the right level.

In this paper, three instruments for empowering small, individual shareholders are compared: proxy investing, proxy voting institutions and infomediaries. The working of each instrument is discussed with special emphasis on the problems of information gathering and coalition forming. Subsequently, each instrument is analysed with respect to appropriateness, costs and effectiveness. No instrument turns out to be clearly superior to the others. Although proxy investing is the most popular concept among small (individual) shareholders at present, the long-run potential of proxy voting institutions and infomediaries may be higher. Since more research could be helpful to establish which of these two options is best, both non-profit organisations and governments could in the meantime stimulate experiments with proxy voting institutions and infomediaries for small shareholders. Copyright (c) 2006 The Authors; Journal compilation (c) 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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