IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp2185.html

Returns to green tasks in Europe: evidence from online job vacancies

Author

Listed:
  • Leanne Cass
  • Federico Fabio Frattini
  • Misato Sato
  • Aurelien Saussay
  • Francesco Vona

Abstract

There is growing evidence that green jobs have higher skill requirements, but whether they offer sufficient wage incentives to encourage workers to acquire those skills remains unclear. We study the green wage premium and its drivers to isolate the average return to green tasksusing online job vacancy (OJV) data for EU countries over the period 2018-2023. We develop a transparent LLM-based approach to classify job vacancies as green when they list at least one green task. Green jobs pay a premium of 5.5% relative to comparable postings within the same occupation, and this estimate is little changed when controlling for nonmonetary job attributes making these jobs more attractive. Roughly half of this premium is explained by firm fixed effects, consistent with an important role for firm rents. An Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that the higher skill complexity explains a further one tenth of the premium, leaving a residual return to green tasks of around 2%. The green wage premium is higher outside the manufacturing sector, and for low-carbon roles.

Suggested Citation

  • Leanne Cass & Federico Fabio Frattini & Misato Sato & Aurelien Saussay & Francesco Vona, 2026. "Returns to green tasks in Europe: evidence from online job vacancies," CEP Discussion Papers dp2185, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2185
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2185.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J60 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2185. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.