GREENLAB – Green Incentives, Labor Markets, and Skill Demand

ArbeidslivGrønt skifte

Prosjektnummer: 3123

Periode: 2027 – 2030

Finansiering: Norges Forskningsråd

Ekstern ref: 361051

Beskrivelse: Summary: Climate policies are reshaping economies, industries, and jobs. Carbon pricing, technology subsidies, and rising energy costs are essential for cutting emissions, yet their consequences for workers remain uncertain. Will these policies spur new industries and create opportunities, or will they threaten jobs and competitiveness? Will they reinforce existing inequalities, or help build a more inclusive transition? These questions are central to the political and economic feasibility of the green transition, but we still know too little about the answers. GREENLAB addresses this gap by examining how green incentives affect firms, workers, and the demand for skills. The project focuses on three key policy tools: carbon pricing, technology subsidies, and energy prices. While earlier research has demonstrated how such measures influence emissions and firm performance, much less is known about their impacts on workers – who gains, who loses, and how the very structure of work is changing. Using Norwayʼs unique administrative data, which links workers, firms, technology adoption, and policy exposure across decades, GREENLAB will provide detailed evidence on how climate policies shape employment, wages, and skill demand. The project will also coordinate comparative studies across Norway, Sweden, and France, offering rare cross-country evidence on the labor market impacts of carbon pricing. By combining population-wide data with state-of-the-art empirical methods, GREENLAB will help bridge two research agendas that have so far developed largely in parallel: the effects of climate policies on firms and emissions, and the worker-level consequences of structural and technological change. In doing so, the project will deliver new insights into whether green incentives amplify or mitigate inequalities, and how climate policy can be designed to be both effective and socially fair. Primary objective: GREENLAB will quantify how green incentives – carbon pricing, subsidies, and energy prices – affect firms, workers, and skill demand, and identify their distributional consequences, using population-wide employer–employee data and causal inference methods. Secondary objectives: 1) Provide worker-level evidence on the employment, wage, and skill impacts of carbon pricing and energy costs. 2) Quantify the effects of green subsidies and technology adoption on labor demand, including distributional outcomes across workers, firms, and regions. 3) Generate comparative cross-country evidence on the worker-level impacts of carbon pricing through harmonized analyses of microdata from Norway, Sweden, and France. 4) Assess whether green incentives reinforce or mitigate skill biases and labor market dynamics linked to technological change and globalization.

Prosjektleder: Elisabeth Thuestad Isaksen

Deltakere: Elisabeth Thuestad Isaksen, Knut Røed, Cloe Garnache

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