journal articles

Energy poverty, i.e., inefficient heating and insufficient access to energy services, can turn a shelter into a health hazard. We find that substandard housing and ineffective heating is associated with a higher risk of poor health in an urban context. We surveyed people living in two middle-sized cities in a coal-dependent region of Poland and used objective and subjective indicators of energy poverty and self-assessed health status. We demonstrate that people who live in substandard housing are more likely to exhibit poor musculoskeletal and cardiovascular outcomes, by 10 and 6 pp, respectively than otherwise similar people living in suitable housing conditions. We show that energy-poor people who use coal or a wood stove have a 24 pp higher likelihood of respiratory disease than the energy-poor who live in flats connected to district heating. We also find that a significant amount of the explained variance in the probability of respiratory disease is attributable to energy poverty. To improve the housing conditions and reduce the risk of poor health outcomes, we recommend two policy instruments: 1) a full subsidy for thermal retrofits and connecting multi-family buildings to the district heating network and 2) a targeted energy voucher for clean heating.

We construct survey-based measures of routine task intensity (RTI) of jobs consistent with those based on the U.S. O*NET database for workers in 47 countries. We find substantial cross-country differences in the content of work within occupations. We assess the contribution of technology, supply of skills, globalization, and economic structures to the variation of workers’ RTI across countries. Technology is by far the most important factor. Supply of skills is next in importance, especially for workers in high-skilled occupations, while globalization is more important than skills for workers in low-skilled occupations. Occupational structure explains only about one-fifth of cross-country variation in RTI.

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.