Environmental regulation and green skills : an empirical exploration

Abstract : 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.