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.

Artisanal gold mining ("galamsey") employs roughly a million Ghanaians and produces a third of national gold output, but its effects on the formal economy are undocumented. We combine a firm census, geocoded household surveys, and night-lights with a shift-share measure of exposure — predetermined Birimian geology interacted with the world gold price. Fully gold-suitable districts host 19 percent fewer formal firms than non-suitable ones, and the survivors are larger; the contraction falls on agriculture-linked sectors, which thin four times faster than mining-adjacent ones, and on wetter, agriculturally productive districts. Household data identify the mechanism: men in exposed districts became markedly more likely to work, and to work in physical and agricultural occupations, after the 2008 boom, with no differential pre-trend over the preceding fifteen years. When the 2017 Operation Vanguard crackdown disrupted mining, night-lights in exposed districts fell about 9 percent. Informal booms reshape local economies by pulling labour into untaxed, unmeasured extraction, not through the fiscal and price channels of large-scale mining.