Measures, Drivers and Effects of Green Employment : Evidence from US Local Labor Markets, 2006-2014

This paper explores the nature and the key empirical regularities of green employment in US local labor markets between 2006 and 2014. The main methodological novelty consists of a new measure of green employment based on the task content of occupations. Descriptive analysis reveals that: 1. the share of green employment is between 2 and 3 percent, with a strongly pro-cyclical trend; 2. the green wage premium is 4 percent; 3. green jobs are more geographically concentrated than similar non-green jobs; and 4. the top green areas are mostly high-tech. As regards to the drivers, direct changes in environmental regulation are a secondary force in explaining the 8-years growth of green jobs compared to the local amount of green subsidies within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the endowment of green knowledge and the resilience to the great recession. Assessing the impact of moving to greener activities, we find that one additional green job is associated with 4.2 (2.2 in the crisis period) new local jobs in non-tradable activities, and that this effect can be mostly ascribed to the green ARRA package