Measures, Drivers and Effects of Green Employment: Evidence from US Local Labor Markets, 2006-2014

Abstract

This paper explores the nature and the key empirical regularities of green employment in US local labor markets between 2006 and 2014. We construct a new measure of green employment based on the task content of occupations. Descriptive analysis reveals the following: 1. the share of green employment oscillates between 2 and 3 percent, and its trend is strongly pro-cyclical; 2. green jobs yield a 4 percent wage premium; 3. despite moderate catching-up across areas, green jobs remain more geographically concentrated than similar non-green jobs; and 4. the top green areas are mostly high-tech. As regards the drivers, changes in environmental regulation are a secondary force compared to the local endowment of green knowledge and resilience in the face of the great recession. To assess the impact of moving to greener activities, we estimate that one additional green job is associated with 4.2 (2.4 in the crisis period) new jobs in non-tradable activities in the local economies.

Job losses and political acceptability of climate policies: why the ‘job-killing’ argument is so persistent and how to overturn it

“…However, this approach may not suffice if specialization in greener production is specific to certain locations, and thus difficult to transfer to areas lagging behind. The evidence in Vona, Marin, and Consoli (2018b) suggests that this is the case, as the areas creating more green jobs also tend to host high-tech industries and national research laboratories. Such persistence is not surprising because technological transitions take time, and are characterized by positive feedback loops from the implementation of a coherent set of climate and social policies that enhance support for such policies (Rosemberg, 2010).…”

Eco-Innovation and Employment: A Task-Based Analysis

“…First, we treat green jobs as Hence, we estimate the greenness of an occupation based on the task content associated with that occupation so that the term green" is a continuous characteristic rather than a binary classication (Peters 2014, Bowen et al 2018, Vona et al 2018. Therefore, we follow Vona et al (2019) and calculate the greenness of each occupation by an analysis of the tasks associated with it, weighted by importance scores, using information from the Green Task Development project within O*NET. 4…”

Impacts of regulation on eco-innovation and job creation

“…Another recent study develops a new measure of green employment based on the task content of occupations [15]. For US local labor markets between 2006 and 2014, the authors show that environmental regulation is a significant driver of green employment dynamics, but the local endowment of green knowledge and resilience seems to be even more important.…”

“…Previous work of the author (together with K. Rennings) contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [12]. Version 2 of the article updates the "Graphical abstract," discusses new strands of literature in this field of research, and adds new "Key references" [6], [14], [15].…”