Francesco Trentini (University of Milano Bicocca)

Understanding green jobs and skills through online job advertisement

Abstract: Green jobs and green skills are at the forefront of the global and European political agenda for the ongoing effort to transition to an environmentally sustainable economy and climate neutral human activities. Understanding the characteristics of green jobs is therefore crucial to inform policies that can mitigate the impact of this structural transformation on the workforce (Vandeplas et al, 2022; Causa et al, 2024). In the literature, the characteristics of green jobs are usually understood through the proxy of occupations, with different levels of detail: green occupations or green tasks within occupations. The former group bundles jobs in a single class, assigning the green label to all jobs here contained, while the second approach takes a step further to provide a greenness score to the occupation based on its tasks (Bowen et al., 2018; Vona et al., 2019). In this work, we add to this literature and introduce a further level of analysis, that is the dimension of green skills. We elaborate an empirical analysis based on FE-OLS regressions exploiting the available data coming from Online Job Advertisements (OJA) of the Eurostat’s Web Intelligence Hub. This data source allows to observe skill requirements at the job advertisement level and therefore studying the heterogeneity within occupation. We study skill requirements for green OJA (ads with at least a green skill in their demanded skillset) within occupation at the ISCO08 IV-digit level in 26 European countries between 2019 and 2023 and find that, ceteris paribus and controlling for occupations, green OJAs are correlated with higher education requirements, higher salary and lower experience requirements. We estimate a wage equation and find positive and significant premium for green OJAs. Introducing a brownness score calculated according to Scholl et al (2023), based on Vona et al (2018), we observe that green OJA in brown occupations enjoy a salary premium compared to the rest of brown OJA. Moreover, we study the similarity between green and non-green OJA skillsets and find that differences are mainly explained by social and communication skills and management skills. Accounting for skill relevance, we find that the skillsets of green OJA are composed more by distinctive skills and show a specialization in cognitive and manual skills. Finally, we study the effect of environmental regulation measured by the OECD’s Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS). Higher EPS is associated with higher education and experience requirements and a lower salary premium. Stricter green regulations raise entry requirements.