Conference Agenda

This paper investigates the employment and earnings impacts of a green transition, leveraging the 2014 oil price shock as a natural experiment to examine labor market consequences from a contraction of Norway's fossil fuel industry. Using matched employer-employee data and a difference-in-differences design, we find that oil workers experienced notable declines in both annual earnings and employment in the years following the shock, with the largest earnings losses among senior, highly educated, and male workers. An event study focusing on displaced oil workers reveals substantially larger declines in earnings and employment relative to comparable non-oil workers. Notably, earnings losses are highest among those with the lowest educational attainment, suggesting that the distributional impacts of the oil price shock itself differ from those of oil job displacement. Although relatively few oil workers transitioned into green jobs, those who did represented a comparable share of the destination workforce as those moving into brown (non-oil) sectors. Workers entering green sectors faced larger earnings losses than those moving into brown jobs, but smaller losses than those shifting into other jobs. Analyzing earnings differentials, we find that lower establishment wage premiums, rather than skill distance or worker sorting, primarily drive these disparities. Our findings highlight the significant transitional costs for fossil fuel workers and suggest that, while targeted policies aimed at skill development alone may not fully restore prior earnings levels, expanding opportunities in green sectors could help offset earnings losses and support labor market adjustment during the green transition.

In this paper, I analyze the local labor market effects following the first wave of the coal plant phase-out in Germany, focusing on the transitional costs for workers in coal mining and electricity. I compare these workers to ones in other industries, within districts that contain coal-fired power plants or mines. The findings show that the policy announcement led to a 5.6-5.8% reduction in the average daily wages of directly affected workers from 2015 to 2019. I demonstrate that the wage impact was most pronounced among workers who separated from their firms after the policy announcement, facing a wage reduction of 10.6-11.0%. The announcement disproportionately affected older workers and those in manual occupations, particularly the ones in the middle of the skill-level distribution. I find that workers who separated from their firms following the closure of a plant moved to new firms within the same districts and remained in electricity or mining. Since I find no effects on overall employment, I provide evidence that renewable installations in treated districts picked up following 2014, suggesting that green energy jobs might have absorbed affected workers.

This paper examines the impact of the 2022 energy price shock on Germany's manufacturing sector. Using shifts in fuel prices and detailed energy consumption data from the German manufacturing census, we construct an exposure measure at the fine-grained four-digit sector level. Combining this with multiple administrative datasets, we document significant adverse effects of the energy price shock on economic activity, high cost pass-through, and negative impacts on investment and wages based on a difference-in-differences design. Finally, we map the price shock to labor market regions to characterize its geographic fallout. The insights from our analysis are highly relevant in the context of the structural changes required for transitioning to carbon neutrality.

Climate awareness is crucial for gaining public support for climate policies. Previous studies show socio-political factors and personal experience of weather shocks as the main drivers of climate attitudes. This paper introduces and empirically tests for international migration induced by weather variations as a novel determinant of climate concern in host countries. I leverage exogenous weather variation in non-OECD countries to construct a gravity-predicted instrument for asylum demands. Using an instrumental variable approach, I find a strong positive effect of weather-induced asylum applications on individual climate concern in European Union countries between 2000 and 2019. Using Google search data, I rule out that news and media coverage are confounding the effect of weather-induced asylum demands. The documented changes in stated preferences, however, do not translate into changes in voting behavior. Using electoral outcomes, I find no effect of weather-induced asylum applications on Green votes in the European Parliament elections. These findings are consistent with three mechanisms that I document, including a drop-out of traditional Green voters, changes in preferences among individuals below the voting age, as well as no changes in the pro-environmental agenda of political parties.