Vaios Triantafyllou

Stringent climate policies in advanced economies increasingly condition market access on the carbon content of production abroad. I study how such regulation affects foreign suppliers, exploiting the introduction of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and tracing its impact on Indian exporters to the EU. I link a proprietary dataset of firm-to-firm customs records to Indian administrative and capital-investment data on a firm level. Subsequently, I classify investment projects using a novel, LLM-applied taxonomy of green, transitional, and vintage technologies for 23 polluting industries. Difference-in-differences estimates show that exposed firms expand their stock of green capital projects by 18% and roughly double pollution-control spending. This is driven by sector-specific green upgrading, substituting vintage, polluting technologies, rather than investing in renewables or carbon-capture equipment. The effect is concentrated among larger firms and those starting from dirtier asset bases. As a result, exposed firms shift from on- site fossil-based power generation to procuring electricity from the grid. The most exposed firms keep exporting to the EU, while less exposed ones divert to other markets, offsetting only a fifth of the EU contraction. Border prices remain unchanged, suggesting that the cost of the regulation is not passed back up the supply chain during the period of study. A structural model of heterogeneous suppliers, differing in productivity and in access to clean energy, choosing whether to enter the EU and whether to switch energy technology, delivers the same sorting and extends it to the charge once fully in force. Nearly half of the fall in India’s EU-bound emissions is volume redirected to other markets, and it reappears there almost one for one. India’s own emissions fall by 4 percent, two thirds of that from switching technology and the rest from producing less. Green upgrading is plant-wide, therefore firms that clean up for the EU do so for sales elsewhere, yielding a negative leakage overall, even though the diversion channel alone is positive. Across all exporting origins the charge cuts emissions by 6 percent and global emissions by 2.4 percent, at a break-even carbon price of 30 dollars per tonne, while India bears the largest proportional welfare loss of any region.

In this paper, I study the impact of Germany’s coal phase-out policy on workers. Using confidential matched employer–employee microdata and a triple difference-in-differences design, I compare workers in electricity generation and coal mining to workers in other industries, across districts with differential baseline dependence on coal-fired power generation, before and after the introduction of the legislation. I find an 8.6% decline in annual labor earnings and a 5.4% reduction in annual days in employment, driven almost entirely by workers in electricity generation. Affected workers were 1.2 p.p. more likely to move into unemployment. The effects were concentrated among middle-aged and less-educated workers, those with shorter job and labor market tenures, and workers in occupations requiring lower experience levels. In an event-study framework around plant closures, I show that workers separating from their establishments experienced larger wage losses compared to those staying, and transitioned into greener but lower-paying establishments. While workers did not transition to other districts or sectors, they were partially absorbed by greener firms, primarily in those districts where green technologies were already abundant.

European Muslim populations have been steadily growing in recent decades, prompting debates about how to reconcile liberal democratic principles with Islamic religious doctrine, particularly in the domain of law, where communities sometimes rely on informal religious institutions to resolve family and inheritance matters, eschewing formal judicial channels. We study the Muslim minority of Northern Greece, historically constrained by Islamic religious law for family and internal community matters, and exploit a 2018 legislative change that gave its members the option to use Greek civil courts for the first time. Collecting original data from the archives of the Civil Courts of First Instance and the archives of religious leaders (Muftis), we document a gradual shift away from the latter and toward civil courts, driven primarily by divorces and thus especially consequential for women. Combining these records with the Greek matched employer-employee microdata, population census, business registry, and household surveys, we find that minority women reduced time spent on domestic tasks and increased labor force participation through self-employment. Both take-up and labor market responses are concentrated in localities where traditional social norms were more prevalent. An ongoing survey examines the underlying mechanisms. Our results speak to debates on multicultural approaches to immigrant integration and the tension between inclusive policies and gender bias in religious law.