Green Skills

Vona, Francesco; Marin, Giovanni; Consoli, Davide; Popp, David

Green Skills

CESifo Working Paper Series No. 5323

60 Pages Posted: 7 May 2015

See all articles by Francesco Vona

Francesco Vona

Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE) - Department for Research on Innovation and Competition

Giovanni Marin

Italian National Research Council (CNR) - Centre for Economic Research on Firms and Growth (CERIS); Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE)

David Popp

Syracuse University - Department of Public Administration; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

There are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: April 30, 2015

Abstract

The catchword ‘green skills’ has been common parlance in policy circles for a while, yet there is little systematic empirical research to guide public intervention for meeting the demand for skills that will be needed to operate and develop green technology. The present paper proposes a data-driven methodology to identify green skills and to gauge the ways in which the demand for these competences responds to environmental regulation. Accordingly, we find that green skills are high-level analytical and technical know-how related to the design, production, management and monitoring of technology. The empirical analysis reveals that environmental regulation triggers technological and organizational changes that increase the demand for hard technical, engineering and scientific skills. Our analysis suggests also that this is not just a compositional change in skill demand due to job losses in sectors highly exposed to trade and regulation.

Keywords: green skills, environmental regulation, task model, workforce composition, structural shocks

JEL Classification: J240, Q520

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Vona, Francesco and Marin, Giovanni and Consoli, Davide and Popp, David C., Green Skills (April 30, 2015). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 5323. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2603553