Conference Agenda

Climate policies have heterogeneous labour market impacts across sectors and occupations that are at the origin of the so-called green populist 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, and of the EU-ETS are mediated by the occupational carbon intensity for a large sample of manufacturing establishments in France. 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. 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.