Climate policies have heterogeneous labour market impacts across sectors and occupations that are at the origin of the so-called green populistic backlash. However, beyond coal miners, there are no criteria to assess worker’s vulnerability to ambitious climate policy. Using rich establishment-level data for France, we construct a time-varying measure of the carbon content of jobs for 411 occupations over the period 2003-2019. We show that carbon-intensive occupations are hard to decarbonize, declining but not in wages, geographically concentrated and also exposed to capital deepening and trade. Using a shift-share instrument, we estimate the extent to which the impact of fossil fuel price shocks, a proxy of stringent climate policy, mediated by the occupational carbon intensity for a large sample of manufacturing establishments. First, we find that the employment decline in carbon intensive occupations is accelerated by fossil fuel price shocks. Second, we do not observe a pass-through of energy prices on wages in carbon intensive occupation, primarily because of the downward rigidities of occupational minimum wages are stronger in carbon-intensive jobs. Third, we show that reallocation effects prevail over displacement effects. Indeed, workers exiting carbon intensive jobs are not more likely to be not-employed, but to change firm and occupation. Similar reallocation effects away from high-carbon jobs are triggered by a milder climate policy, the EU-ETS.
COLLABORATION
Analyses, survey insights and a practical guide mark a key milestone in the Erasmus+ project supporting data-driven vocational training across five European countries.
