Albert Duodu

Production in manufacturing firms in high-income countries is generally becoming cleaner. Some of this trend has been shown to be due to the adoption of new technologies, but carbon offshoring – when dirty production at home is replaced with imports of carbon-intensive products from abroad – may be an additional factor. Leveraging Swedish firm-product level data between 2005–2014 and combining shift-share instrumental variables with a difference-in-differences design, I find that a 10% increase in the import of emission-intensive goods makes firms' production processes about 5% cleaner but increases transport emissions by 2%. The type of offshoring matters: foreign direct investment has a much larger emissions-reducing effect than offshoring through arm's-length imports.

We examine how local import competition – measured across different spatial dimensions within Sweden – affects the CO₂ emission intensity of manufacturing firms. Using detailed geographic data on Swedish manufacturers, we show that increased local import competition leads to lower firm-level emissions, with the effect diminishing as the distance between producers and importers grows. We identify two mechanisms: (i) a pro-competitive efficiency effect, with gains in TFP, higher value added, lower marginal costs, and higher markups; and (ii) a product-mix effect, with reallocation away from emission-intensive goods. We also document evidence of carbon offshoring and investment in pollution abatement as additional firm responses.

Carbon pricing is a cornerstone of climate policy, yet its firm-level incidence remains poorly understood. Combining matched employer–employee and firm-level data from Sweden (2006–2014) with a shift-share IV and a dynamic difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in exposure to energy tax reforms, I show that higher energy prices generate substantial reductions in energy use and CO₂ emissions. These environmental gains come with economically meaningful adjustments: declines in productivity and employment, and incomplete cost pass-through. The incidence is highly heterogeneous – low-productivity firms and high-skilled workers bear disproportionate costs, while more productive firms absorb shocks more easily.

How do citizens respond when the state repeatedly fails at a visible task? Using geocoded data on 201,286 respondents across 42 African countries and Ghana’s 2012–2016 dumsor electricity crisis, we show that sustained local outages lower presidential approval while simultaneously raising contentious participation—contacting officials, organising, and protesting. This divergence rules out generalised disaffection and points instead to a targeted political response: citizens punish the incumbent and act, rather than withdraw. Exploiting the dumsor crisis in a difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure sharply erodes beliefs about state competence, with a clear dose-response in outage intensity. Chronic failure to deliver basic services thus reshapes how citizens evaluate and engage the state, with direct consequences for political accountability.

Resource-curse models typically assume extraction is formal, operating through rents and the real exchange rate. But much of the developing world’s mining is informal—and may reshape the economy through a different channel: labour. We study Ghana’s artisanal gold mining sector (“galamsey”), large but largely undocumented in its effects, to ask how informal resource booms reshape firms and labour markets. Our identification combines a shift-share shock—pre-determined geological gold suitability interacted with the world gold price—with spatial regression discontinuities at geological and mining-activity boundaries, and uses the 2017 military crackdown on illegal mining as a sharp policy break. Districts more exposed to artisanal mining host fewer formal firms but larger surviving ones, with the contraction concentrated in agriculture-linked sectors and agriculturally productive regions. Household data reveal the mechanism: where mining expands, workers reallocate out of formal and agricultural employment into artisanal extraction and informal labour. The 2017 crackdown relieves this formal-sector contraction but depresses aggregate local activity by about 10 percent, underscoring how much income the informal boom sustains. Informal resource booms can thus hollow out the formal economy not through rents or prices, but by pulling labour into low-productivity informal extraction.

Where do the local effects of a resource boom land? Using a global panel of half-degree grid cells across 195 countries from 1989 to 2014, with within-country identification drawn from the 74 countries containing both petroleum and non-petroleum cells, I compare petroleum and non-petroleum cells within the same country and year, with identification validated by high-frequency oil supply news shocks around OPEC announcements. Petroleum cells brighten by roughly eight percent over the 1998–2008 boom. Aggregate organised conflict shows no systematic escalation, but disaggregated UCDP and ACLED outcomes reveal a modest reallocation toward lower-intensity, non-state and civilian-targeted violence rather than a flat null. The development response is moderated on two independent pre-sample institutional margins, state capacity and ethnic political exclusion: cells in high-capacity countries with politically included populations exhibit the full response, cells where either margin is unfavourable show sharp attenuation, and cells where both bind show no detectable response. The positive cross-country correlation between oil exposure and conflict is recovered in this data only when within-country variation is removed; the within-country local response and the cross-country association are distinct empirical objects. The institutional moderation is consistent with mechanisms in which state capacity and political access shape how local revenues reach resident populations; the design recovers reduced-form differentials in local economic activity rather than measuring transfers, public spending, or household welfare directly.