journal articles

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 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 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.

This study examines the gender dimension of occupational exposure to contagious diseases spread by the respiratory or close-contact route. It shows that in Europe, women are more exposed to contagion, as they are more likely than men to work in occupations that require high levels of contact and physical proximity at work. Women are also less likely to be able to work remotely, which contributes to their increased exposure. The study finds that gender is a more important factor in workers’ exposure to contagion than their education or age. This gender difference in exposure can be largely attributed to patterns of sectoral segregation and to the segregation of women within sectors into occupations that require more interpersonal interactions. Finally, results reveal heterogenous cross-country patterns in gender gaps in exposure to contagion in the workplace, with Nordic, Continental, and Baltic countries showing relatively large gender gaps to the disadvantage of women.

We study how the de-routinisation of jobs affects workers at different ages in 12 European countries. The shift away from routine work and toward non-routine work occurred much faster among workers aged between 25 and 44 than among older workers. In the majority of countries, the ageing of the workforce occurred more quickly in occupations that were initially more routine-intensive, as the share of older workers in these occupations was rising and the share of young workers declining. The unemployment risk related to routine task intensity was increasing, especially among individuals between the ages of 15 and 34, and to a larger extent in countries with fast ICT capital growth and in countries not increasing their participation in global value chains.