Working Papers
Wired For Change? Clean Technology Adoption and Labor Market Transitions, Job Market Paper.
Whether the energy transition will harm or benefit workers is a central policy concern. This paper provides the first ex-post estimates of transition costs when small and medium enterprises adopt clean technologies. I study heating service firms in France as they shift from installing fossil fuel boilers to heat pumps. Tracking workers through matched employer-employee data, I document substantial within-firm labor reallocation but low transition costs overall. While displaced workers recover their earnings within one year, stayers adjust by working longer hours. Hourly wages rise for those exposed early to the technology or facing smaller skill gaps, but primarily through employer changes rather than within-firm raises. This demonstrates how market incentives can facilitate on-the-job skill updating, keeping adjustment costs low even amid significant labor reallocation.
Overpromising Green Jobs? Evidence from the French Energy Efficiency Obligations Program, with François Cohen and Victor Kahn, Mar. 2025. Working Paper; Slides EEA 2025.
Concerns over job losses are eroding support for climate action. The EU Green Deal promises one million jobs by 2030, with energy efficiency as key driver. However, projections rely on unverified ex-ante estimates. This paper provides the first ex-post estimate of employment impacts from a large-scale energy efficiency programme. Using a policy discontinuity in France and a state-of-the-art synthetic control method on disaggregated data, we find 2.2 job-years created per million euro invested, far below the 8.52 jobs assumed in EU assessments. We find no evidence of a major labor shortage, as transition costs are low and wages remain stable. However, only 10% of the subsidy increase translates into new hires, while 28% is absorbed into firms’ value added. Hence, rent capture by local energy-efficiency installers leads to an inefficiency in the use of the subsidies, potentially undermining the green transition.
How Costly Is Carbon Abatement in the Residential Sector? Evidence from Energy Efficiency Obligations, with Matthieu Glachant. Working Paper.
We evaluate the French Energy Savings Certificates program, under which energy retailers subsidize building retrofits to meet mandatory efficiency targets. Using sub-municipal electricity and gas data from 5 million housing units (2018–2021), we first estimate its impact on energy use and associated carbon emissions. We then develop a novel revealed-preference approach to measure the average carbon abatement cost, leveraging the tradability of certificates. Combining certificate prices with estimated energy savings and emissions factors yields a preferred estimate of €104 per ton of CO2e. Accounting for the pass-through of program costs into retail energy prices and the resulting reduction in energy demand lowers this to €65 per ton, indicating overall cost-effectiveness. This is despite official reports overstating realized energy savings by 69%.