Co-Authors: Vona Francesco (OFCE SciencesPo), Marin Giovanni (Ceris-CNR and OFCE SciencesPo) and Davide Consoli (INGENIO)

This paper is the first to provide comprehensive evidence of green employment dynamics for a panel of US metro and non-metro areas over the period 2006-2014. We propose a new task-based measure of green employment, test its validity against previous measures and show that it outperforms other measures in grasping the within- rather than between-industry nature of green activities. Our descriptive analysis highlights three interesting facts on green employment: 1. its share has decreased during the great financial crisis and recovered afterwards; 2. top green areas are not very persistent over the time period considered; 3. compared to similar occupations, the concentration of green jobs is higher in 2006 but declines and becomes slightly lower in 2014. We try to partially account for this convergence using exogenous changes in geographical stringency of environmental regulation. Our estimated effects indicate that environmental regulation contributes to the recovery in the share of green employment after the 2010 increasing by 7.2% the share of employment in super-green occupations. The effect of environmental regulation is mainly on the within-industry component of green employment and stronger for non-offshorable green jobs. The evolution of the green wage premium responds as expected to change in regulation, but especially so for low-skilled green jobs workers.