We evaluate the employment effect of the green part of the largest fiscal stimulus in recent history, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Each $1 million of green ARRA created 15 new jobs that e merged especially in the post-ARRA period (2013-2017). We find little evidence of significant short-run employment gains. Green ARRA creates more jobs in commuting zones with a greater prevalence of pre-existing green skills. Nearly half of the jobs created by green ARRA investments were in construction or waste management. Nearly all new jobs created are manual labor positions. Nonetheless, manual labor wages did not increase.

Investments in the green economy are used for both environmental goals and fiscal stimulus. The success of these investments depends, at least in part, on whether they create new jobs and whether such jobs are available to workers hurt by a green transition. We evaluate the employment effect of green investments from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Most job creation from green ARRA investments is permanent and emerged in the post-ARRA period, but the plausible range of estimates is extremely wide (zero to twenty-five jobs per $1 million). Such large uncertainty on aggregate effects masks substantial heterogeneity across communities. The green stimulus mostly benefited areas with a greater prevalence of preexisting green skills that created 40 percent additional jobs than average communities. New jobs are primarily manual labor and in occupations performing green tasks, especially in renewable energy. However, manual labor wages do not increase. Descriptive evidence suggests that the skill gap between green energy and fossil fuel workers is modest, but green jobs require significantly more training. Because the spatial distribution of skills and jobs matters, using green stimuli can help reshape the economy in the long run but may also exacerbate regional inequities associated with the green energy transition.

As nations struggle to restart their economy after COVID-19 lockdowns, calls to include green investments in a pandemic-related stimulus are growing. Yet little research provides evidence of the effectiveness of a green stimulus. We begin by summarizing recent research on the effectiveness of the green portion of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on employment growth. Green investments are most effective in communities whose workers have the appropriate “green” skills. We then provide new evidence on the skills requirements of both green and brown occupations, as well as from occupations at risk of job losses due to COVID-19, to illustrate which workers are most likely to benefit from a pandemic-related green stimulus. We find similarities between some energy sector workers and green jobs, but a poor match between green jobs and occupations at risk due to COVID-19. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence on the potential for job training programs to help ease the transition to a green economy.

Policy scholars have effectively leveraged policy process models, theories, and frameworks to respond to a variety of important environmental questions. For example, how do environmental issues arrive on the agendas of policymakers? What factors contribute to environmental policy change? What are the designs and effects of institutions (e.g., policies or cultural norms) on environmental governance? In this review, we survey the field of policy process scholarship, focusing on environmental governance, with three objectives. The first objective is to catalog the policy process models, theories, and frameworks most often featured in studies of environmental governance. The second is to capture the methodological choices commonly employed in the application of these models, theories, and frameworks in environmental domains. The third is to identify how these approaches deal with issues central to environmental governance research, including time, space, and policy scale. We aim to identify trends and strategies for integrating key considerations of scale into empirical policy process scholarship.

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