Research

This paper investigates the environmental consequences of corporate consolidation, focusing on how mergers influence firms’ greenhouse gas emissions, green innovation, and vegetation health. I combine theoretical and empirical approaches to examine whether the potential reduction in competition resulting from mergers affects environmental performance. Theoretically, I model the trade-off between market power and emissions, showing that mergers can reduce emissions either by lowering output through increased pricing power or by incentivizing green innovation. Empirically, using firm-level data from 2006 to 2022, I implement a panel event study and a difference-in-differences (DiD) design that compares completed and cancelled mergers. I find that mergers lead to reductions in absolute emissions, a decline in green patenting, and no significant change in vegetation health—effects. These results are particularly pronounced in notifiable transactions subject to antitrust scrutiny. These findings suggest that corporate consolidation may also have important implications for environmental policy.

We study how climate transition risk shapes corporate bankruptcy. We construct a novel dataset linking U.S. bankruptcies to environmental violations, facility-level emissions, and satellite-derived vegetation health. We find that firms facing higher transition risk are more prone to distress and bankruptcy. By exploiting quasi-random judge assignment, we find that judges who are lenient toward carbon-intensive firms are more likely to approve reorganizations and grant greater debt relief. After bankruptcy, these firms increase emissions and degrade local vegetation, revealing a trade-off between financial restructuring and environmental quality. 

What is the impact of energy price shocks on jobs? This paper examines how an increase in energy prices affects employment using the 2022 energy price crisis as a natural setting. While interesting in its own right it is also indicative of the employment effects of further carbon pricing which - like the 2022 fuel price shock - lead to an increase of carbon intensive fossil fuels such as oil and gas. While the sharp price increase of 2022 induced by the Russian attack on Ukraine was largely uniform across firms, we derive its impact by examining the differential employment response of firms with varying cross price elasticities between energy and employment. Thus we use a shift-share design where the energy price shock becomes the shift and cross price elasticities are the shares. Using the energy crisis of 2022 as a natural setting and detailed administrative UK firm-level data, we exploit variation in firms’ energy dependence by combining two measures of exposure: cross price elasticities between labor and energy, and energy cost shares. We estimate the heterogeneous impacts of rising energy costs on firms’ employment decisions. Our results show that higher energy prices led to modest job losses, with less than one percent of jobs in our sample lost over 2022 and 2023 due to increased energy costs. However, the impact was far from uniform. The contraction in employment is concentrated in energy intensive sectors such as Electricity and Gas, Water and Waste, and Transportation, and is particularly evident in rural and peripheral regions where labor markets are less flexible and alternative job opportunities are limited. We also find that mid-sized firms bear a disproportionate share of the employment adjustment compared to both small and very large firms. These findings show how energy price volatility can generate uneven effects across sectors, regions, and firm sizes, highlighting the importance of targeted policy responses such as energy price stabilisation and support for workforce mobility to help reduce adverse labor market impacts during periods of energy price shocks.