This study demonstrates that heat disproportionately impairs human capital accumulation among low-performing students compared with their high-performing peers, using nationwide examination data from 22 million students in Japan. Given the strong correlation between academic performance and...

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...

We characterize optimal climate policy in an economy with heterogeneous households and non-homothetic preferences. We focus on constrained efficiency, where the planner is restricted from transferring resources across households. We derive three results. First, the constrained-optimal carbon tax...

We study the distributional effects of remote learning using a novel approach combining preference data from a conjoint survey with administrative records. Experimentally derived preferences account for selection into remote learning and treatment effect heterogeneity. We validate the approach...

We provide new evidence on the effects of fiscal consolidation measures on output, unemployment, income inequality and consumer price inflation. To identify causal impacts, we use a narrative-based instrumental variable strategy drawing on historical records of exogenous fiscal changes motivated...

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 study demonstrates that heat disproportionately impairs human capital accumulation among low-performing students compared with their high-performing peers, using nationwide examination data from 22 million students in Japan. Given the strong correlation between academic performance and...

Inequality often arises from strategic interactions among individuals. This is so because risky investments can not only be resolved by chance (natural risk), but also by others' actions (social risk). We study how these different sources of inequality shape fairness judgments and the level of...

The EU's Fit for 55 policy package to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 has direct impacts on households. The distributional analysis in this paper is in line with the existing literature in pointing to the risk of a moderately regressive distributional impact and to...

We study how China's loan‐to‐value (LTV) policy affects mortgage markets and household consumption, focusing on an abrupt and unprecedented relaxation in LTV limits for secondary houses from 2014Q4 to 2016Q3. Using a rich dataset of over three million loan‐level records from a major...

Using exhaustive microdata on the worldwide activity of multinational firms from Country-by-Country Reports linked to employer-employee data, we study how profit shifting affects workers' earnings. We estimate that large French multinationals shift 19% of their foreign profits annually to...

This paper uses cross-sectional surveys of households over 2007-21 from Thailand's Socio-Economic Expenditure Survey to conduct one of the first investigations of the impacts of climatic variability on two key statistics characterizing the distribution of welfare in Thailand: the mean and the...

Between 2010 and 2017, nominal wage growth in the UK public sector was capped at 1% for all workers earning above £21,000 - the median annual salary in 2010. This paper examines the distributional consequences of this policy. We show that the cap reduced the return to observable characteristics...

We quantify changes in concentration, market power and welfare in the UK grocery retail sector from 2002 to 2021. We document that an expansion of discounter-format retailers coincided with declining retail and manufacturer concentration across most narrowly defined product categories. We...

Populist parties use narratives about social injustice to portray climate policy as elite-driven and socially unjust. This study- based on a survey experiment with some 1,600 participants- examines how three common narratives about the costs associated with climate policy affect populist and...

We estimate distributional implications of global food and oil price shocks by utilizing monthly panel data on consumption and income from India, and an IV strategy that removes variation coming from global demand shocks. While both shocks lead to stagflationary aggregate dynamics, they differ...

Populist parties increasingly deploy narratives of social injustice to portray climate policy as elitist and unfair. This paper investigates how such narratives affect public attitudes toward populism and democratic institutions. We conduct a survey experiment with approximately 1,600...

Inequality often arises from strategic interactions among individuals. This is so because risky investments can not only be resolved by chance (natural risk), but also by others' actions (social risk). We study how these different sources of inequality shape fairness judgments and the level of...

Inequality often arises from strategic interactions among individuals. This is so because risky investments can not only be resolved by chance (natural risk), but also by others' actions (social risk). We study how these different sources of inequality shape fairness judgments and the level of...

Inequality often arises from strategic interactions among individuals. This is so because risky investments can not only be resolved by chance (natural risk), but also by others' actions (social risk). We study how these different sources of inequality shape fairness judgments and the level of...

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...

Different economic agents might respond differently to the same policy action. Information about household and firm heterogeneity can, therefore, enhance central banks' understanding of monetary policy transmission and ultimately its effectiveness. Cross-sectional data can also help central...

The previous federal government coalition had planned to pay private households a climate dividend to offset rising carbon prices; a payout process was even prepared. However, the climate dividend is nowhere to be seen in the new federal government's coalition agreement. In the long term, a...

Carbon taxes on household consumption can simultaneously increase public funding and promote greener consumption habits, an appealing combination for the just transition plans of the European Union (EU). However, concerns about equity and public support pose challenges. This paper assesses the...