Regional economic conditions are well-established determinants of the geography of political resentment. However, regions are not homogeneous, and the mechanisms through which local economies affect individual political attitudes are unclear. We argue that feelings of relative deprivation are shaped by how personal prospects are tied to regional conditions, and that the interaction between subjective individual and regional deprivation affects perceptions of shared struggle and systemic unfairness. Through a large-scale survey experiment in Britain addressing geographical self-selection, we provide causal evidence that poor individuals in poor regions express political resentment, whereas in affluent regions the political attitudes of poor and wealthy individuals are indistinguishable. Our findings stress 1) the importance of egocentric mechanisms whereby local economies shape individual prospects; 2) the significance of subjective beliefs over objective information on deprivation; 3) the mobilization potential of highlighting regional deprivation by political entrepreneurs; 4) the relevance of place-based policies to mitigate political discontent.

This paper studies how minimum wage policy affects firms’ adoption of automation technologies. Using both state-level measures of robot exposure and novel plant-level data on industrial robot imports linked to U.S. Census microdata from 1992–2021, we show that increases in minimum wages raise the likelihood of robot adoption in manufacturing. Our preferred identification exploits discontinuities at state borders, comparing otherwise similar firms exposed to different wage floors. Across specifications, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increases robot adoption by roughly 8 percent relative to the mean.

We study how and why local biodiversity affects residential property values. Leveraging remotely sensed greenness indicators and a novel dataset of granular property listings, we examine how changes in vegetation load on real estate prices. Hikes in greenness are associated with higher listing prices, fewer properties listed, and reduced liquidity in housing markets. These results suggest that price hikes in housing markets are driven by supply-side constraints instead of a “greenium” that buyers might be willing to pay due to innate preferences. Exogenous zoning shocks to foster biodiversity corroborate the presence of supply side constraints as price drivers in residential housing markets. Our findings emphasize the need to calibrate biodiversity and (social) housing policy objectives more explicitly.

Climate policies do not operate in isolation but propagate through global production networks, affecting industries beyond national borders. This paper combines international input-output data with a granular instrumental variable approach to capture how foreign regulations transmit through upstream and downstream linkages. Distinguishing between market-based policies, non-market regulations, and technology support, the analysis shows that foreign climate policies can enhance domestic productivity, with effects shaped by industry characteristics and operating through technological adjustment along supply chains. The results underscore the importance of accounting for international spillovers when evaluating the economic impact of environmental regulation.

Based on a sufficient statistics approach, we show how the state of technology of European industries relative to the rest of the world can be empirically assessed in a way that is simple in terms of computation, parsimonious in terms of data requirements, but still comprehensive in terms of information. The lack of systematic cross-industry correlation between export specialization and technological advantage suggests that standard measures of revealed comparative advantage only imperfectly capture a country’s technological prowess due to the concurrent influences of factor prices, market size, markups, firm selection and market share reallocation. These findings offer policy insights relevant to the EU’s external competitiveness debate, echoing several recommendations from the Draghi report. Achieving export specialization in key sectors requires more than just technological superiority.

This paper examines the macroeconomic and distributional effects of the European Union’s transition to Net Zero emissions through a gradually increasing carbon tax. I develop a New Keynesian Environmental DSGE model with two household types and distinct energy and non-energy sectors. Five alternative uses of carbon tax revenues are considered: equal transfers to households, targeted transfers to Hand-to-Mouth households, subsidies to green energy firms, and reductions in labor and capital income taxes. In the absence of technological progress, the carbon tax policy induces a persistent increase in energy prices and a reduction in GDP, investment, and consumption. Headline inflation falls below zero in the medium run, reflecting weaker aggregate demand. Distributional outcomes vary significantly depending on the implemented revenue recycling scheme: targeted transfers are the most progressive but entail larger macroeconomic costs, while subsidies and tax cuts mitigate output and investment losses but are less effective in narrowing the consumption gap. A limited foresight scenario, in which agents learn about policy targets sequentially, generates more volatile adjustment paths and temporary inflationary spikes around announcements, but long-run outcomes remain close to the baseline.