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Many countries have phased out nuclear power in response to concerns about nuclear waste and the risk of nuclear accidents. This paper examines the shutdown of more than half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. We use hourly data on power plant operations and a machine learning approach to estimate the impacts of the phase-out policy. We find that reductions in nuclear electricity production were offset primarily by increases in coal-fired production and net electricity imports. Our estimates of the social cost of the phase-out range from €3 to €8 billion per year. The majority of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels. Policymakers would have to significantly overestimate the risk or cost of a nuclear accident to conclude that the benefits of the phase-out exceed its social costs. We discuss the likely role of behavioral biases in this setting, and highlight the importance of ensuring that policymakers and the public are informed about the health effects of local air pollution.

Many urban school districts in the United States and OECD countries confront the necessity of closing schools due to declining enrollments. To address this important policy question, we formulate a sequential game where a superintendent is tasked with closing down a certain percentage of student capacity; parents respond to these school closings by sorting into the remaining schools. We estimate parents' preferences for each school in their choice set using 4 years of student-level data from a mid-sized district with declining enrollments. We show that consideration of student sorting is vital to the assessment of any school closing policy. We next consider a superintendent tasked with closing excess school capacity, recognizing that students will sort into the remaining schools. Some students will inevitably respond to school closings by exiting the public school system; it is especially difficult to retain higher achieving students when closing public schools. We find that superintendents confront a difficult dilemma: pursuing an equity objective, such as limiting demographic stratification across schools, results in the exit of many more students than are lost by an objective explicitly based on student retention.