Environmental regulation and green skills : an empirical exploration

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

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)

We present a data-driven methodology to identify occupational skills that are relevant for environmental sustainability. We find that these green skills are mostly engineering and technical know-how related to the design, production, management and monitoring of technology. We also evaluate the effect of environmental regulation on the demand of green skills exploiting exogenous geographical variation in regulatory stringency for a panel of US metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas over the period 2006-2014. Our results suggest that, while these recent changes in environmental regulation have no impact on overall employment, they create significant gaps in the demand for some green skills, especially those related to technical and engineering skills.

Keywords: Environmental regulations; Green skills; Task model; Workforce composition

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance

Francesco Vona, Giovanni Marin, Davide Consoli, David Popp. Environmental regulation and green skills : an empirical exploration. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2018, 5 (4), pp.713 - 753. ⟨10.1086/698859⟩. ⟨hal-03471569⟩