Publications

Climate change poses complex risks that extend beyond environmental impacts, shaping social and economic inequalities. This paper examines how physical risks, such as extreme weather, and transition risks, linked to decarbonization and green policies, affect women's empowerment in firms across developing and developed contexts. Using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and World Development Indicators, we measure empowerment through female employment, management, and ownership. Our results reveal contrasting effects: physical risks reduce female ownership, while transition risks boost female management, particularly in smaller, younger, non-exporting, and non-privately owned firms. The negative impact of physical risks is largely uniform, except in foreign-owned firms, and operates mainly through constraints on finance and land. These findings highlight the need for integrated climate and gender policies that recognize women not only as vulnerable to climate change but also as key agents of sustainable economic transformation.

While fiscal rules are often viewed as an effective way to curb the deficit bias arising from, inter alia, partisan pressures in common-pool budget settings, much less is known about how their effects vary with partisan preferences. This paper fills that gap by estimating local projections for a panel of EU-27 countries over 1995-2019. We innovatively link COFOG expenditure categories with the Manifesto Project Database to study how political preferences condition the impact of tighter fiscal rules across spending functions. Our first result is that more stringent national fiscal rules are associated with lower public spending in the short-and medium-run. Digging deeper, we show that the recomposition of expenditure under tighter rules depends on governments' preferences: adjustment falls disproportionately on categories that are less favoured by the incumbent. These results are robust to alternative estimators, different definitions of the dependent variable, and placebo tests. Lastly, the cuts associated with stricter fiscal rules in low-preference government contexts are amplified when sovereign debt yields are higher.

This study examines how epidemic outbreaks influence foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in developing countries, with a particular focus on whether healthcare systems can act as buffers during such shocks. Using a panel dataset of 98 countries from 2000 to 2022, the analysis combines two-way fixed effects (FE) models and the Local Projection Method (LPM). The analysis is structured in three parts: First, fixed-effects regressions assess the average effect of 20 major epidemics on FDI, revealing that diseases such as Ebola, MERS, Lassa Fever, and Leptospirosis significantly reduce investment inflows. Second, local projection methods trace the short-and medium-term responses of FDI to health shocks by transmission type. The results show varying recovery patterns: while FDI tends to rebound after direct contact or mosquito-borne outbreaks, airborne diseases cause more persistent declines. Third, the study explores whether stronger healthcare systems can mitigate these negative effects. Results suggest that countries with a higher density of nurses experience less severe FDI losses during outbreaks, particularly for diseases transmitted through direct contact or bodily fluids. These findings underline the importance of healthcare investment not only for public health but also for economic resilience. By distinguishing effects across disease types and highlighting the moderating role of health infrastructure, this study offers practical insights for policymakers seeking to safeguard investment flows during times of crisis.

Environmental concerns are becoming more pressing as the climate emergency intensifies, posing a major challenge for many governments: increasing green investments to promote better adaptation and resilience to climate events, while maintaining fiscal discipline. This raises the question of whether governments that operate under fiscal rules tend to safeguard environmental spending in light of the climate emergency, or whether they are more inclined to scale it back to meet their fiscal targets, given that such investments require substantial public funding. Using data covering 31 advanced economies between 1995 and 2021, we find robust evidence that the strengthening of fiscal rules significantly reduces environmental spending, in particular debt rules and expenditure rules. Moreover, the adverse impact of fiscal rules on environmental expenditures is amplified during election periods, whereas it is mitigated in the presence of sound past fiscal conditions, the Kyoto Protocol, and stringent environmental policies. Further analysis reveals that although fiscal rules tend to reduce environmental spending, they are associated with greater efficiency in such spending.

This paper studies whether profile-based explanations influence investors' acceptance of algorithmic risk recommendations in a randomized controlled trial embedded directly in the platform's interface of a leading French robo-advisor. Users were assigned either to see graphical explanations of the drivers underlying their recommended risk score and associated portfolio or to receive the standard interface with no explanation. Our results, obtained in a real-world setting with actual clients of a FinTech, do not support the adherence gains from increased transparency that are widely anticipated in the literature. Overall, providing profile-based explanations is not found to increase acceptance of the recommended profile nor raise users' engagement with the platform. However, we find a heterogeneous treatment effect as profilebased explanations lead to a greater downward deviation among desktop users who have already deviated to safer-than-recommended portfolios, but this pattern disappears once users' experience of the platform is taken into account. We observe non-causal evidence in both conditions that behavior is shaped primarily by the digital context and experience: phone and first-time users are more likely to accept the portfolio recommendation than desktop and returning users. While such transparency-enhancing profile-based explanations are informative, they are not a universal lever for adherence, suggesting that explanation design should be tested and tailored across device types and users' experience.

Based on the 2020 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) IV Environment Module, this paper examines how individual characteristics influence the willingness to pay to protect the environment. We contribute to the literature by highlighting the role of social status: the higher respondents place themselves on the social scale, the more they are willing to pay; and of prosocial orientation: the more willing respondents are to take action for the environment independently of others, the more they are willing to pay. We underline that the impact of social status, i.e., respondents' subjective perception of their position on the social scale, remains significant even after controlling for income and education levels. Our results suggest that, in order to strengthen individuals' willingness to pay for the environment, two types of policies may be effective: (1) policies aimed at influencing subjective social status and its determinants -for example, exposing professional groups to narratives framing their position as socially valued, reducing perceived inequalities, enhancing individuals' sense of control over life events, and fostering orientation toward long-term planning; and (2) policies aimed at shaping prosocial orientation, that is, convincing individuals that personal actions are meaningful even when they are not widely adopted by others. Besides, based on our results, climate policies can be successful when imposing net costs on the following groups: individuals who rank themselves in the top 40% of the population (social status); the 50% of individuals who agree to act without waiting for others to do so (prosocial orientation). By contrast, climate policies that impose net costs on the complementary segments of the population are likely to face disapproval.