Green Higher Education and Environmental Quality: The case of Italy

This paper examines the impact of green-oriented university education on environmental quality, by developing a conceptual framework in which firm emissions depend on the joint use of green technologies and green-skilled labor. In complementarity between these inputs, an increase in the local supply of green-skilled labor induces firms to adopt more green technologies, thereby improving environmental quality. In addition, we show that this effect is stronger in more labor-intensive sectors. Guided by these theoretical insights, we perform an empirical analysis based on a novel measure of green higher education, constructed using administrative data on more than 90,000 university course descriptions in Italy. We build an indicator of the green content of academic programs using natural language processing techniques and aggregate it at the provincial level to proxy the supply of green-skilled workers. Combining this measure with detailed data on environmental quality, proxied by different types of air emissions, including carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). We find that a higher supply of graduates with more intensive green skills is associated with significantly lower emissions of key pollutants, including CO2, CO, PM10, and PM2.5. This relationship is robust to a wide set of controls and fixed effects. In line with our model, the association is stronger for service-related emissions than for industrial sources. In general, these findings highlight the role of higher education as a key driver of improved environmental quality through the provision of green skills.