ABSTRACT Why do discrimination shocks generate persistent labour market differences when bias itself may be short‐lived? Existing studies focus primarily on wage effects, offering limited insight into how such shocks reshape workers' labour market trajectories. I develop a framework in which discrimination may operate through occupational reallocation, as affected workers adjust by moving across jobs, including into lower‐paying occupations. Using panel data and a difference‐in‐differences design, I exploit the September 11 attacks as an exogenous shock to bias against immigrants perceived to be associated with the Middle East. I find evidence consistent with a modest and time‐varying earnings penalty, alongside stronger patterns of reallocation, particularly shifts towards lower‐paying occupation categories among less‐educated workers. The findings illustrate how occupational reallocation may provide an additional margin through which temporary discrimination shocks generate longer‐run labour market consequences.
ABSTRACT Script reforms are common nation‐building tools, yet rigorous evidence on their effects is scarce. This paper examines Uzbekistan's transition from Cyrillic to Latin script, mandated in 1993 and implemented in schools from 1996. I study heterogeneous effects across initial conditions using a difference‐in‐differences design that exploits variation in exposure across birth cohorts and pre‐reform district characteristics. The reform had no significant average effect on literacy, but it generated substantial heterogeneity: districts with lower baseline literacy gained 0.09 standard deviations per standard deviation of the baseline literacy gap, whereas districts with more Russian speakers experienced relative losses of about 0.05 standard deviations. These patterns reveal the redistributive politics of nation‐building. The reform also reshaped labour markets: Latin‐exposed cohorts moved away from state employment and, less sharply, from entrepreneurship. The same cohorts became more likely to express intolerance towards speakers of other languages, an effect specific to the linguistic margin. The findings suggest that script reforms do not deliver aggregate literacy improvements but have significant distributional consequences and may heighten ethnolinguistic divisions.
ABSTRACT The impact of climate risk on micro‐organisations has received growing attention. However, whether and how climate risk affects corporate climate governance activities is not well understood. Leveraging meteorological station data, we construct firm‐level climate risk index to examine this relationship across Chinese listed firms during 2011–2020. Results demonstrate that green patent quality is diminished in response to the firms’ high level of climate risk, implying that corporate climate risk exposure tends to trigger a negative psychology of problem avoidance, which inhibits the quality of corporate green innovation. Besides, mechanism tests suggest that management emotion and management green attention are the primary channels to explain the above inhibitory effect. Further analyses reveal that this inhibitory effect is weaker for those firms with strong climate governance supervision. In a nutshell, this study provides new evidence for firms to objectively understand and mitigate adverse climate impacts by documenting the impact of Chinese firm‐level climate risks on green innovation quality.
This article investigates the changes in the structure of employment in Central and Eastern European firms between 2001 and 2007, before the Global Financial Crisis and following the reforms in the labour and credit markets in these economies. By linking firms' workforce restructuring to their access to credit, this article interrogates well-accepted theorisations of employment changes including those focusing on labour flexibility. From a policy perspective, these findings question the sole reliance on labour market flexibility as employment policy and advocate for a tighter coordination of labour and credit interventions to limit the negative impact on the quality of jobs of firms' credit needs.
Which extractive institutions perpetuate rural poverty in conflict-affected regions? Based upon neo-institutionalism, I examine poverty determinants across 1122 Colombian municipalities (2011-2020). Although land concentration appears to reduce poverty, correcting for endogeneity reverses this relationship, confirming its function as an extractive institution that restricts land property rights. Technical progress consistently reduces misery. Centre periphery dynamics-particularly infrastructure deficits and educational exclusion-corroborated by spatial autocorrelation prove decisive. Forced displacement and coca cultivation, rather than direct violence, drive conflict-related poverty. Effective peace transition requires transforming informal extractive norms-clientelistic land access, technological aversion, spatial exclusion and violence as conflict resolution-alongside formal institutional reforms.
