Carbon pricing is becoming increasingly common but raises equity concerns and is frequently perceived as putting higher burdens on the poor than the rich. This chapter discusses the reasons for unequal carbon price burdens across countries and population groups, through the lens of a comparative...

In recent years, EU member states have faced two significant crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and high inflation, exacerbated by geopolitical instability. These events have led to a decline in household purchasing power. Our study aims to quantify the impact of these crises on household income...

Due to rent control, the primary landlord-tenant dilemma prevents landlords from recovering costs of energy-efficiency retrofits, which mainly benefit tenants. This necessitates tenancy law to allocate retrofit and energy costs adequately. We analyze the impact of Germany's current system and...

Improving domestic revenue mobilization extremely important for Zimbabwe to create the fiscal space to absorb quasi-fiscal expenditures and support macroeconomic stability. In November 2023, Zimbabwe announced measures to raise additional tax revenue. This included limiting value-added tax (VAT)...

We use Zip code-level Statistics of Income data from the Internal Revenue Service to measure the distribution of income within U.S. metropolitan areas from 1998 through 2019. Exploiting geographic variation in income distribution over time, we study how unanticipated changes in the monetary...

This paper introduces Parameter Estimation by Raw Moments (PERM), a flexible method for evaluating a policy's impact on the parameters of an outcome distribution. Such parameters include the variance (E[Y 2 ]−E[Y] 2 ), skewness and covariance of two outcomes. PERM simplifies distributional...

Using disaggregated US household expenditure data, we study the distributional consequences of the US-China trade war. We estimate a highly flexible demand system to compute household-specific price indexes. The increases in US tariffs on Chinese products between 2018 and 2019 led to an average...

Mozambique is highly vulnerable to climate change. It faces frequent cyclones, floods, and droughts while having limited revenue collection capacity and social protection programmes. This paper assesses the distributional effects of climate shocks on household consumption and explores adaptation...

Individuals trade present for future consumption across a range of economic behaviors, and this tradeoff may differ across socioeconomic groups. To assess these tradeoffs, we estimate a dynamic model of residential solar adoption and system sizing in California using household-level data on...

This paper examines trends in household financial strain across Europe from 2006 to 2022, a period marked by three major economic shocks: the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. Using a subjective measure of welfare, financial strain, we analyse...

Low emission zones (LEZ) represent a key environmental policy instrument to address air pollution in cities. LEZs have reduced air pollution and associated health damages in regulated areas, but it remains unclear who has benefited from cleaner air. To examine the distributional effects of LEZs,...

Negative oil supply shocks since the 1980s have increased German inflation and reduced aggregate economic activity. Using 45 years of high-frequency German administrative data, we find that these shocks disproportionally harm low-income individuals: their earnings growth falls by two percentage...

The EU has embarked on an ambitious path toward climate neutrality. How difficult will this transition be for the population as a whole and different subsets of consumers? This paper investigates this question using a dynamic general equilibrium model that captures a key feature of energy...

We assess household burdens from a carbon tax with revenue recycling, comparing them to burdens from price changes during the recent cost-of-living crisis. We focus on Lithuania, an OECD country that attained high-income status a decade ago, and that recently enacted a €60/ton CO2 carbon tax...

As middle income countries grow they see an increase in demand for energy. To avoid extreme climate change as these countries develop, there will be a need to decarbonise the increased energy consumption as they grow. We use the PRICES microsimulation model to examine the impact of carbon...

The energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the heightened vulnerability of low-income households to rising heating costs, particularly those in energy inefficient buildings. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study examines the distributional...

Carbon pricing is becoming increasingly common but raises equity concerns and is frequently perceived as putting higher burdens on the poor than the rich. This paper discusses the reasons for unequal carbon price burdens across countries and population groups, through the lens of a comparative...

This paper examines the role of positive income shocks in helping workers adapt to extreme temperatures. We use daily temperature variations alongside the exogenous implementation of a wage and fiscal policy in Mexican municipalities along the US border to show that increased disposable income...

While the potential of carbon pricing to curb CO2 emissions is widely acknowledged, the instrument keeps being disputed due to its potential regressivity and the burden it places on low-income households. Recently also the issue of horizontal inequalities has gained in importance in political...

Earlier empirical evidence indicates that locus on control (LoC), a non-cognitive skill reflecting an individual's belief that life's outcomes result from their own efforts, is relatively unresponsive to major life events. This study re-examines this evidence by utilizing a longer panel dataset...

This paper uses administrative labour market data from Czechia to investigate the heterogeneous effects of technology shocks. Using a FAVAR, the shock is identified using medium run restrictions à la Uhlig (2004b). Workers on low wages reduce their hours in response to the shock, while the...

The world has faced an increasing number of global shocks that have resulted in large and unpredictable changes in global prices, particularly of food. These increases, coupled with the negative impacts of shocks to economic growth, have had damaging effects on welfare, hunger, and diets. Future...

While Tanzania's greenhouse gas emission levels still seem low by international comparison, the country is rapidly carbonizing, and most households still rely on kerosene, charcoal, and firewood for cooking and lighting. Carbon pricing can be an effective tool to discourage the creation of high...

This chapter examines the distributional effects of place-based policies in the EU. In a first step, it characterizes existing income inequalities in the EU and distinguishes between their interregional and intraregional dimensions. A key result is that inequalities within European regions make...

While the EU-wide carbon price has already been adopted for the buildings and transport sectors with ETS°2, detailed analyses of the macroeconomic and distributional effects (both within and between countries) are scarce. We use the macroeconomic model ADAGIO to estimate the effects of EU-wide...