Do Environmental Regulations Cost Jobs? An Industry-Level Analysis of the UK

This paper revisits the 'jobs versus the environment' debate and provides the first analysis for a country other than the US. We firstly examine the impact of environmental regulations on employment assuming such regulations are exogenous. However, for the first time in a study of this nature, we then allow environmental regulation costs and employment to be endogenously determined. Environmental regulation costs are not found to have a statistically significant effect on employment whether such costs are treated as being exogenous or endogenous. We therefore find no evidence of a trade-off between jobs and the environment.