Vaios Triantafyllou

Stringent climate policies in advanced economies increasingly extend beyond their borders, conditioning market access on the environmental impact of production abroad. I study how regulation of this kind affects supplier firms outside the regulating jurisdiction, inducing them to adopt green technologies, reorganize production, or adjust their trade behavior. I exploit the introduction of the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which prices embedded emissions in imports of energy-intensive goods. Combining a proprietary customs dataset of firm-to-firm trade linkages with Indian administrative and capital-investment data, I construct firm-level measures of exposure for Indian suppliers of EU firms. To classify their investments, I assemble a novel taxonomy of production technologies for 23 polluting industries and apply it to the full database through the use of a Large Language Model. In a difference-in-differences framework, I compare exporters to the EU to other exporters, as well as to all firms, as two alternative comparison groups. I find that exposed firms raise green investment, upgrading to sector-specific technologies that substitute vintage, polluting ones, with little evidence of renewable or carbon-capture installations. The effect is driven by larger firms already integrated into the EU market, implying that CBAM accelerates upgrading among firms already positioned to comply. Exposed firms also reorganize production by limiting fossil-fuel inputs and build compliance capacity through increasing their wage bill and labor training expenditure, and hiring more consultancy and audit services. To study trade responses, I employ a triple-differences design exploiting variation across covered and non-covered products, baseline firm exposure, and the timing of the policy. I provide evidence of diversion from the EU toward non-EU-European and Asian markets, driven by firms facing higher ex-ante CBAM costs and lacking long, established trade relationships.

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.