Essays on Inequality, Digitalization, and the Environment

This thesis consists of five thematically related chapters on inequality, digitalization, and the environment. Two recurring themes are (i) who captures rents under shocks and how institutions shape income distribution, and (ii) how inequality and digital technologies alter emissions with policy-relevant trade-offs. The first chapter decomposes Germany’s 2021-2023 inflation across 11 sectors using Gross Value Added deflators, showing that profits - not wages - captured 57.6% of price growth in high-inflation sectors, with implications for competition and fiscal policy to countermeasure inflation and distributional impacts. Chapter 2 constructs Ecuador’s first Distributional National Accounts (1990-2022) from survey-tax microdata, finding persistent top-end concentration (top one percent: 25% of pretax income) and a fragile move from extractive to weakly inclusive institutions during the commodity boom that eroded post-COVID. Chapter 3 integrates tax registers and machine learning-based consumption to account for the carbon emissions of the "missing rich": the top ten percent share of disposable income rises from 30% (survey) to 46% (integrated) and their emissions share from 26% to 31%. However, full redistribution would raise emissions by 26% versus 6% in survey-only estimates - highlighting needs for the design of emission-mitigating in combination with income redistributional policies. Chapter 4 estimates the net climate effect of digitalization across industrialized countries: digitalization in firms and households generally lowers carbon dioxide emissions, but the optimum differs - lower-income industrialized countries lie above its potential emission-reducing level of digitalization while higher-income ones remain below efficiency-enhancing levels. Chapter 5 investigates digitalization in the agricultural sector: adopting digital yield monitoring in 28 states in the United States (1996-2010) reduces nitrous oxide per unit of output and per hectare; production expands, yet efficiency gains dominate, delivering net emission cuts and provide evidence for climate-smart agriculture.