The 2015 Paris Climate Conference put finance at the heart of the debate on environmental degradation. But what exactly is the relationship between finance and environmental pollution? This paper analyses the mechanisms that connect financial development, industrial composition and environmental...

There is limited research on the determinants of firms’ green investment strategies in developing regions despite their importance to meet global climate change targets. Understanding how changes in firm climate investment affect environmental performance is essential for policy makers and...

This paper looks at the effects of air pollution on migration in China using changes in the average strength of thermal inversions over five-year periods as a source of exogenous variation for medium-run air pollution levels. Our findings suggest that air pollution is responsible for large...

The spectre of populism is haunting Europe and the West, but what is driving this populism? In this paper we look at the implications of the Great Recession on voting for anti-establishment parties, as well as for general trust and political attitudes, using regional data across Europe. Our...

About 1.4 million refugees and irregular migrants arrived in Europe in 2015 and 2016. We model how refugees and irregular migrants are self-selected. Using unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls, we provide the first large-scale evidence on...

This paper looks at how various project- and client-related factors determine the non-financial success of EBRD investments. Non-financial project success is defined as the extent to which transition objectives, such as the demonstration of new financing methods or the expansion of competitive...

This paper looks at the links between inequality of opportunity and views about the underlying processes that support economic success or failure. Unlike income inequality, inequality of opportunity isolates the extent to which inequality in circumstances beyond an individual's control...

Could robotization make the gender pay gap worse? We provide the first large-scale evidence on the impact of industrial robots on the gender pay gap using data from 20 European countries. We show that robot adoption increases both male and female earnings but also increases the gender pay gap....

Can policymakers improve macroeconomic performance by encouraging the entry of high-performance startups? To answer this question, we construct a novel and comprehensive data set on 1.3 million startups in ten European countries. We apply cluster analysis to identify distinct startup types and...