Green employment: What, where and how much?

Francesco Vona (1) , Giovanni Marin (2) , Davide Consoli (3)

1 OFCE - Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques (Sciences Po)
2 Università degli Studi di Urbino 'Carlo Bo'
3 CSIV-UPV - INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) (Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Management)

Addressing grand environmental challenges (e.g. climate change) entails adapting the skill base and, thus, the composition of the workforce. Recent interventions both in the form of environmental regulation or of subsidies – i.e. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 and its green component which accounts approximately for 15% of the overall fiscal stimulus – revived the debate on whether environmental policies create or destroy employment. However, existing empirical evidence on green employment is limited in terms of timespan and scope due to data constraints. In a recent study (Vona et al., 2018), we tackle this gap by elaborating a novel approach to measure green employment in US local labour markets. Using the task approach to approximate the time a worker spends in green activities (Acemoglu and Autor, 2011), allows us to provide a nuanced picture of how green employment has evolved in the turbulent period between 2006 and 2014 as well as a suggestive estimation of the effect of “becoming greener” for local labour markets. [First paragraph]

Keywords: Green activities; Green employment; Us labor market

Domains: Economics and Finance

Francesco Vona, Giovanni Marin, Davide Consoli. Green employment: What, where and how much?. 2018. ⟨hal-03392412⟩