Using a a discrete choice experiment with 10,000 people in Poland, we examine public preferences for policies to achieve energy security and climate change mitigation goals in the context of the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We find a strong aversion to carbon tax, only slightly mitigated by redistribution. Income, trust, and age shape preferences for climate and energy policies, and for redistribution mechanisms.

We study the effect of the adoption of automation technologies – industrial robots, and software and databases – on the incidence of atypical employment in 13 EU countries between 2006 and 2018. Industrial robots significantly increase atypical employment share, mostly through involuntary part-time and involuntary fixed-term work. There's no effect of software and databases. Higher trade union density mitigates the robots’ impact on atypical employment, while employment protection legislation plays no role.

We study the relationship between global value chain (GVC) participation, worker-level routine task intensity, and wage inequality within countries. Using survey data from 34 countries and instrumenting for GVC participation, we find that higher GVC participation is associated with more routine-intensive work, especially among workers in offshorable occupations. This indirectly widens within-country wage inequality. However, GVC participation directly contributes to reduced wage inequality, except in the richest countries. Overall, GVC participation is negatively associated with wage inequality in most low- and middle-income countries that receive offshored jobs, and positively in high-income countries that offshore jobs.

We investigate how subjective and objective assessment of COVID-19 risks affect preferences toward working from home (WFH). We conducted a discrete choice experiment combined with an information provision experiment with more than 11 000 workers in Poland. Estimating willingness to pay for WFH, we find that the subjective assessment of COVID-19 risk matters more than objective occupational exposure. Informing workers about occupational exposure to contagion generally does not affect preferences toward WFH.