Vaios Triantafyllou

Climate policies in advanced economies increasingly condition market access on the carbon content of production abroad. Foreign suppliers can respond by adopting cleaner technologies, contracting, or redirecting their exports to less regulated markets. I study these responses and their implications for global emissions and welfare in the context of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). To do so, I link proprietary firm-to-firm customs records with administrative and capital-investment data for Indian firms exporting to the EU. Subsequently, I develop a novel taxonomy of green, transitional, and vintage technologies by industry, which I use to classify a database of 60,000 investment projects with a Large Language Model. Difference-in-differences estimates show that exposed exporters expand their stock of green capital projects by 18%, upgrading older, polluting production technologies. Exposed firms also substitute purchased grid electricity for on-site fossil-fuel generation and redirect exports away from the EU. These responses vary systematically with exposure. Firms with more at stake in the EU market invest in cleaner production to preserve market access, while less-exposed firms are more likely to divert exports elsewhere. Prices at the Indian border remain flat throughout the period of study. To quantify the aggregate effects, I develop a general equilibrium model of trade and technology adoption among heterogeneous suppliers. The model shows that CBAM reduces global emissions in the covered industries by 1.9%, at a cost of USD 11 per tonne of carbon avoided, well below recent estimates on the social cost of carbon. These reductions arise primarily from plant-wide technology adoption, which lowers emissions from goods sold in markets not subject to the charge. If firms could instead adopt cleaner technologies only for EU-bound production, global emissions reductions would be a third smaller and emissions from sales outside the EU would barely fall.

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.