Albert Duodu

Albert Duodu

Postdoctoral Researcher in Economics
Aalto University · Helsinki Graduate School of Economics

I study how economic shocks (energy prices, trade, natural-resource booms and electricity shortages) reshape firms, workers and the state, and who ends up bearing the costs.

My job market paper shows that Swedish manufacturers look cleaner partly because they import carbon-intensive goods instead, while the freight that carries those imports goes uncounted.

I work at the intersection of environmental, international trade and development economics, with a growing interest in political economy. My work draws on large administrative and micro datasets, from linked employer–employee and firm registers, customs and energy-use records to household and firm surveys, geocoded data and satellite imagery. I pair these with quasi-experimental designs, including shift-share instruments, difference-in-differences and spatial discontinuities, to identify causal effects. I received my PhD in Economics from Lund University in 2024.

Job Market Paper Download CV

Research

My job market paper, papers under review, working papers and projects in progress. PDFs are linked where available.

Job Market Paper

Cleaner Firms, Dirtier Trade: Carbon Offshoring and the Limits of Production-Based Accounting
Job Market Paper PDF
Manufacturing in rich countries is getting cleaner—on paper. Recent firm-level studies find little evidence that offshoring to pollution havens drives this clean-up. Linking plant-level fuel use for Swedish manufacturers (2006–2014) to imports weighted by their embodied carbon, I instrument firms’ carbon imports with a shift-share of foreign export-supply shocks. A 10 percent rise in carbon imports lowers production-based CO₂ intensity by 6.7 percent. The decline comes from scale, not cleaner technique. The pollution-haven margin, sourcing the same products from dirtier origins, is weak on average, as earlier studies find, but significant among firms that bought many distinct products before the shock, the only ones with room to reallocate. Yet the carbon does not disappear: firms’ own transport emissions and the international freight carrying their imports both rise, and the national inventory attributes neither to Swedish manufacturing. The imported goods embody 64 percent more carbon than producing them in Sweden would. At most 2 percent of imported carbon enters through a country where the importing firm owns a plant, so leakage policy aimed at multinationals misses almost all of it, and the EU’s carbon border adjustment, which excludes freight, misses the transport leg. Where emissions are counted can matter as much as whether they fall.

Under Review

The Incidence of Public Pay Reform: Earnings, Sorting, and Service Delivery under Ghana’s Single Spine Policy
R&R, Journal of African Economies
Who gains when a government raises and compresses public pay, and does the raise reach the services the state delivers? Ghana’s 2010 Single Spine Pay Policy placed roughly 400,000 public employees on a single salary schedule and raised the public wage bill by about half within two years. It was explicitly designed to lift the lowest-paid. It did not. Using four waves of nationally representative household surveys and a difference-in-differences identified within birth cohort, gender and ethnicity groups that no pay reform can reshuffle, I find that public earnings rose by about nine log points, but that the gain accrued almost entirely to workers with secondary education and above; those with middle schooling or less gained nothing measurable. Nor did the money reach the services those workers staff. Matching household health surveys to districts’ pre-reform public-employment shares, facility delivery, antenatal care and skilled birth attendance all rose by less where the state employed most, and the displaced births went home, unattended, rather than to private clinics. None of this is visible against the comparison group used in the prior literature, whose informal wages raced ahead during Ghana’s commodity boom.
Greener Under Pressure: The Local Geography of Import Competition and Emissions in Swedish Manufacturing
Under Review with Zouheir El-Sahli PDF
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.
Environment and the Economy: Firm-Level Responses to Energy Price Shocks
Under Review PDF
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.

Working Papers

When the Lights Go Out: Service Failure and Political Attribution in Africa
Working Paper
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.
Artisanal Mining and the Hollowing of the Formal Sector: Evidence from Ghana’s Galamsey Zones
Working Paper with Michael Danquah PDF
Informal resource booms can reshape local economies in ways that formal-sector statistics miss. We study Ghana’s artisanal gold boom (galamsey), which employs roughly a million people. We measure each district’s exposure using the interaction between its share of land on gold-bearing Birimian bedrock and the world gold price. Gold-suitable districts have about 19 percent fewer formal establishments than other districts in the same region, a cross-sectional gap concentrated in agriculture-linked sectors. Household surveys show a distinct change in male employment: between 2003 and 2014, as the gold price more than tripled, the male employment rate in fully gold-suitable districts rose by about 6 percentage points relative to other districts, mostly in agricultural and manual occupations. We find no differential trend in the 1990s. The establishment gap is larger in wetter districts and absent in drought-prone ones, a pattern consistent with agriculture being an important source of labour for mining. Night-lights in exposed districts fell by about 9 percent after the 2017 crackdown on illegal mining, although the estimate is imprecise. Taken together, the findings describe gold-belt districts with fewer formal establishments but a relative rise in male employment, a combination that establishment counts alone would not reveal.

Work in Progress

Who Bears the Carbon Border? Optimal CBAM Design with Incomplete Pass-Through
In Progress with Matti Liski
Lights Out, Tax Gone: The Fiscal and Institutional Consequences of Electricity Shortages
In Progresswith Lennard Zyska
Electricity Rationing, Firm Dynamics and Labour Market Inequality
In Progress with Timothy Köhler and Lennard Zyska
Where Do Oil Windfalls Reach? Local Transmission, State Capacity, and Ethnic Exclusion
In Progress

Teaching

Courses I teach and have taught at Aalto University, Lund University and the University of Ghana.

Resources

Tools, guides and data I use and recommend, for PhD students and researchers working on applied questions in environmental, trade and development economics.

Useful Resources

Difference-in-Differences

Causal Inference Texts

Coding, Data and Reproducibility

The Profession

Data Directories

Replication Archives and General

Global Development and Inequality

Africa

Nordic Administrative Data

Trade

Energy, Environment and Climate