Jobs Versus the Environment: An Industry-level Perspective
| dc.creator | Morgenstern, Richard D. | |
| dc.creator | Pizer, William A. | |
| dc.creator | Shih, Jhih-Shyang | |
| dc.date | 2017-04-01T20:00:40Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-09T02:59:01Z | |
| dc.description | The possibility that workers could be adversely affected by environmental policies imposed on heavily regulated industries has led to claims of a "jobs versus the environment" trade-off by both business and labor leaders. The present research examines this claim at the industry level for four heavily polluting industries: pulp and paper mills, plastic manufacturers, petroleum refiners, and iron and steel mills. By focusing on labor effects across an entire industry, we construct a measure relevant to the concerns of key stakeholders, such as labor unions and trade groups. We decompose the link between environmental regulation and employment into three distinct components: factor shifts to more or less labor intensity, changes in total expenditures, and changes in the quantity of output demanded. We use detailed plant-level data to estimate the key parameters describing factor shifts and changes in total expenditures. We then use aggregate time-series data on industry supply shocks and output responses to estimate the demand effect. We find that increased environmental spending generally does not cause a significant change in industry-level employment. Our average across all four industries is a net gain of 1.5 jobs per $1 million in additional environmental spending, with a standard error of 2.2 jobs-an insignificant effect. In the plastics and petroleum sectors, however, there are small but significantly positive effects: 6.9 and 2.2 jobs, respectively, per $1 million in additional expenditures. These effects can be linked to favorable factor shifts-environmental spending is more labor intensive than ordinary production-and relatively inelastic estimated demand. | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.22004/ag.econ.10526 | |
| dc.identifier | https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10526/files/dp990001.pdf | |
| dc.identifier | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10526 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/524198 | |
| dc.language | eng | |
| dc.publisher | ||
| dc.source | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10526 | |
| dc.title | Jobs Versus the Environment: An Industry-level Perspective | |
| dc.type | Text |