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 for distributional impacts for different workers remains scant. We examine the associations between climate policies, proxied by energy prices and a stringency index, and workforce skills for 14 European countries and 15 industrial sectors over the period of 1995-2011. We find that, while the long-term decline in employment in most carbon-intensive sectors is unrelated to policy stringency, climate policies have been skill biased against manual workers and have favoured technicians and professionals. This skill bias is confirmed using a shift-share instrumental variable estimator

Keywords: Climate policies; Workforce skills; Cluster analysis; Multiple exposure to structural shocks

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance

Giovanni Marin, Francesco Vona. Climate policies and Skill-biased employment dynamics : evidence from EU countries. 2018. ⟨hal-03458172⟩