This paper evaluates the redistributive and labour supply effects of transitioning from a partially joint to a fully individualised income tax system in Ireland. The current system benefits married couples by allowing tax band and credit sharing but disincentivises secondary earners (typically women) from working. Using the microsimulation model for Ireland, SWITCH, we estimate that a fully individualised tax system would lead to income losses increasing with income level. While a fixed poverty line suggests a slight rise in at-risk-of-poverty (AROP) rates, a floating poverty line reverses this effect as the threshold falls post-reform. Linking the microsimulation to a structural labour supply model, we find that individualised taxation increases married women’s labour supply, therefore enhancing their economic independence.

We consider the problem where a set of individuals has to classify m objects into p categories by aggregating the individual classifications, and no category can be left empty.
An aggregator satisfies Expertise if individuals are decisive either over the classification of a given object, or the classification into a given category.  We show that requiring an aggregator to satisfy Expertise (or variants of it) and be either unanimous or independent leads to numerous impossibility results.

How do emotions affect policy views on immigration? How do they influence the way people process and respond to factual information? We address these questions using a survey experiment in Italy, which randomly exposes around 7,000 participants to (i) sensational news about immigrant crimes, (ii) statistical information about immigration, or to (iii) the combination of both. First, we find different effects of news depending on the severity of the reported crime: while the news of a rape against a young woman significantly increases the demand for anti-immigration policies, there is no impact of the news of a petty theft. Consistent with a causal role of emotions, we find that the rape news triggers a stronger emotional reaction than the theft news, while having a similar effect on factual beliefs. Second, we document that information provision corrects beliefs, irrespective of whether participants are also exposed to the rape news. Yet, the exposure to the rape news strongly influences whether belief updating translates into change in policy views: when presented in isolation, information tends to reduce anti-immigration views; when combined with the rape news, the impact of the latter dominates and participants increase their anti-immigration views to the same extent as when exposed to the rape news only. This evidence suggests that, once negative emotions are triggered, having more accurate factual knowledge no longer matters for forming policy views on immigration.

This paper investigates the impact of mass layoffs on firms’ wage-setting power within local labor markets. Using a sample of French firms, I estimate firm-level markdowns – the ratio of marginal revenue product of labor over wages – capturing monopsony power. Using exhaustive matched employer-employee data to identify mass layoffs. I use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the effect of mass layoff on markdowns. Mass layoffs increase local firms’ markdowns by 3%, with a more pronounced effect observed for firms close to the mass layoff (less than 2.5 km). This impact is stronger in less dense local labor markets, implying shocks to local markets exacerbate disparities in monopsony power between regions. This increase in monopsony power is partly driven by displaced workers’ distaste for long-distance reallocation, increasing local firm market power.

In this study, we analyze the effects of economic sanctions on the taxation of natural resources in targeted countries using de jure and de facto measure of
the resource rent average effective tax rate (AETR). We rely on a sample of 20 African countries for de jure AETR and a global sample of 75 developing
and developed countries for the de facto one over the period 2000 to 2020. Based on a Spatial Durbin Model, which account for the spillover effects of
sanctions, we find three key results. First, sanctions are contagious across neighboring countries. Second, economic sanctions have a significant effect
on de jure AETR but not on de facto AETR. Third, the results remain consistently heterogeneous while considering the nature (financial or trade)
and the origin (bilateral or multilateral) of the sanctions. The implication is that economic sanctions affect the resource taxation policies of the target
countries, which contribute to limit the adverse effect of sanctions on their de facto share of resource rent.

The paper studies attitudes to climate change in Russia, a cold and natural resource-abundant country. We run a survey, based on a modified version of Dechezleprêtre et al. (2022), in which Russia was not included. While maintaining the original survey’s core structure, we introduce three key novel components. First, we examine within-country variation in public knowledge, opinions, and support for climate policies focusing on differences between fossil fuel-rich and fossil fuel-poor regions. Second, we expand the original set of randomized treatments by including informational videos on different aspects of Russia’s 2023 Climate Doctrine, a presidential decree which publicly communicates the government’s stance on climate change. Third, we assess public trust in experts communicating about climate change, including economists. We show that Russian respondents are significantly less convinced that climate change is real and anthropogenic, but an educational video about the physical aspects of climate change increases understanding of the causal link between CO2 emissions and climate change. Nonetheless, the willingness to fight climate change is more in line with respondents in other countries. A video that emphasizes the injunctive part of the Climate Doctrine and invites participants to fight climate change has a significant effect on their support for such actions.