Climate policies and skill-biased employment dynamics: evidence from EU countries

Giovanni Marin (1) , Francesco Vona (2)

1 Università degli Studi di Urbino 'Carlo Bo'
2 OFCE - Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques (Sciences Po)

The political acceptability of climate policies is undermined by job-killing arguments, especially for the least-skilled workers. However, evidence of the distributional impacts for different workers remains scant. We examine the associations between climate policies, proxied by energy prices, and workforce skills for 14 European countries and 15 industrial sectors over the period 1995–2011. Using a shift-share instrumental variable estimator and controlling for the influence of automation and globalization, we find that climate policies have been skill biased against manual workers and have favoured technicians. The long-term change in energy prices accounted for between 9.2% and 17.5% (resp. 4.2% and 8.0%) of the increase (resp. decrease) in the share of technicians (resp. manual workers).

Keywords: Climate policies; Workforce skills; Employment impact; Cluster analysis; Energy prices; Shift-share instruments; Climate policies

Domains: Economics and Finance

Giovanni Marin, Francesco Vona. Climate policies and skill-biased employment dynamics: evidence from EU countries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2019, 98, ⟨10.1016/j.jeem.2019.102253⟩. ⟨hal-03403628⟩