Firm training is widely regarded as crucial for protecting workers from automation, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. Using internationally harmonized data from over 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on tasks performed at work. Our analysis reveals substantial within-occupation variation in automation risk, overlooked by existing occupation-level measures. To assess whether firm training mitigates automation risk, we exploit within-occupation and within-industry variation. Additionally, we employ entropy balancing to re-weight workers without firm training based on a rich set of background characteristics, including tested numeracy skills as a proxy for unobserved ability. We find that training reduces workers’ automation risk by 3.8 percentage points, equivalent to 8% of the average automation risk. The training-induced reduction in automation risk accounts for 15% of the wage returns to firm training. Firm training is effective in reducing automation risk and increasing wages across nearly all countries, underscoring the external validity of our findings. Training is similarly effective across gender, age, and education groups, suggesting widely shared benefits rather than gains concentrated in specific demographic segments.

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.

I estimate management opposition to unions in terms of hiring discrimination in the German labor market. By sending 13,000 fictitious job applications, revealing union membership in the CV and pro-union sentiment via social media accounts, I provide evidence for hiring discrimination against union supporters. Callback rates are on average 15% lower for union members. Discrimination is strongest in the presence of a high sectoral share of union members and large firm size. I further explore variation in regional and sectoral strike intensity over time and find suggestive evidence that discrimination increases if a sector is exposed to an intense strike. Discrimination is positively associated with the sectoral share of firms that voluntarily orientate wages to collective agreements. These results indicate that hiring discrimination can be explained by union threat effects.

How durable are the political accountability effects of the worst pandemic in a century? We track the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on political preferences through its “high” and “low” phases in the Czech Republic. Uniquely, we ask about the effects of both the health and the economic costs of the pandemic measured at both personal and municipality levels. Consistent with the literature, we estimate effects suggestive of political accountability of leaders during “high” pandemic phases without higher support for non-democratic alternatives. However, we also find that the pandemic political accountability effects are mostly short-lived, and do not extend to the first post-pandemic elections.

There is growing evidence on the role of economic conditions in the recent successes of populist and extremist parties. However, little is known about the role of over-indebtedness, even though debtor distress has grown in Europe following the financial crisis. We study the unique case of the Czech Republic, where by 2017, nearly one in ten citizens had been served at least one debtor distress warrant even though the country consistently features low unemployment. Our municipality-level difference-in-differences analysis asks about the voting consequences of a rise in debtor distress following a 2001 deregulation of consumer-debt collection. We find that debtor distress has a positive effect on support for (new) extreme right and populist parties, but a negative effect on a (traditional) extreme-left party. The effects of debtor distress we uncover are robust to whether and how we control for economic hardship; the effects of debtor distress and economic hardship are of similar magnitude, but operate in opposing directions across the political spectrum.