Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 43, 80–98
We study the labour market transition pathways driven by the coal phase-out in Poland between 1990 and 2050. We apply the concept of branching points to describe the coal transition in the context of structural and labour supply changes and educational upgrading. We show that in the 1990s and 2000s, job opportunities for miners were scarce, as the trajectories of these trends deteriorated their labour market prospects. As these trends have reversed in the 2010s, the future employment outlook of the coal phase-out in Poland is more favourable than in the past. Decarbonisation will lead to a surplus of Polish hard coal mining workers from 2030, yet the projected shortages of workers in other sectors will create opportunities for reallocation.
We estimate the macroeconomic and distributional effects that a ban on fuel imports from Russia would have in Poland. We simulate the embargo as a hike in oil, gas and coal prices, and evaluate the macroeconomic effects with a dynamic general equilibrium model. Depending on the severity of the price hikes, we expect Poland’s GDP to be lower by 0.2–3.3% by the end of 2022, and by 2.1–5.7% by 2025. Furthermore, depending on the price increases, high-income households would spend an additional 0.2–1.3% of their incomes on energy in 2022 and 0.7–1.6% in 2025, and low-income households would spend 0.3–4.7% more of their incomes on energy in 2022 and 2.6–4.8% in 2025.
Economics of Transition and Institutional Change. 30, 237–267
We evaluate the impact of large minimum wage hikes on employment and wage growth in Poland between 2004 and 2018. We estimate panel data models utilizing the considerable variation in wage levels, and in minimum wage bites, across 73 Polish NUTS 3 regions. We find that minimum wage hikes had a significant positive effect on wage growth and a significant negative effect on employment growth only in regions of Poland that were in the first tercile of the regional wage distribution in 2007. These effects were moderate in size, and appear to be more relevant for wages. Specifically, if the ratio of minimum wage to average wage had remained constant after 2007, by 2018, the average wages in these regions would have been 3.2% lower, while employment would have been 1.2% higher. In the remaining two-thirds of Polish regions, we find no significant effects of minimum wage hikes on average wages or on employment.
We estimate that by January 2022, vaccinations halved the number of COVID-19 deaths in Poland in 2021 as compared to what would happen if a vaccine would not be available. People aged 70 and over made up the vast majority of prevented deaths. Vaccinating people aged 70+ is a much more effective method of lowering COVID-19 mortality rates than vaccinating people of working age.
We assess the distributional impact of introducing a carbon tax in a small open economy, using the case of Poland. We use a dynamic general equilibrium model with a search mechanism in the labour market, soft-linked to a microsimulation model based on household budget survey data. We find that the distributional effects depend on the recycling of revenues. Using them to reduce labor taxation attenuates the negative effect of carbon tax on GDP and employment but increases inequality compared to a lump-sum transfer to households. This finding highlights the trade-off between efficiency and equity. Our results could be relevant for other countries producing fossil fuels, such as South Africa, Germany, or Australia.
We study the gender differences in aversion to COVID-19 exposure using a natural experiment of the 2020 US Open. We find that female players were significantly more likely than male players to have withdrawn from the 2020 US Open. While players from countries characterized by relatively high levels of trust and patience and relatively low levels of risk-taking were more likely to have withdrawn than their counterparts from other countries, female players exhibited significantly higher levels of aversion to pandemic exposure than male players even after cross-country differences in preferences are accounted for. About 15% of the probability of withdrawing that is explained by our model can be attributed to gender.
