Energy Efficiency Obligations are widespread policy instruments to reduce energy use. They require energy suppliers to deliver a set amount of energy savings. The obligated parties then comply by offering subsidies for energy-efficient investments to energy users. We use a new dataset covering over 3.1 million energy retrofit projects from 2018 to 2020 to assess the impact of the French program on residential electricity and gas use. We find that the official reporting on the program’s outcome significantly overstates the energy savings by at least 69%. We exploit the fact that obligations are tradable to propose an novel revealed preference approach to the average cost of carbon abatement. Our estimate accounts for both monetary and non-monetary costs and benefits. At €179/ t. CO2 eq., it is consistent with large unpriced comfort gains associated with energy renovation that standard CBA do not capture.
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.
I investigate the effects of green technology adoption on employment and workers' career trajectories. I leverage a subsidy-driven surge in heat pump installations in France, and find that a 1% higher exposure to the shock increases installers' probability to adopt the new technology by 2.5%. Using matched employer-employee data and a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find that adoption at the firm level increases total employment by 7% within 18 months. Both job creation and destruction occur, indicating labor reallocation within firms. The skills required by clean energy technology appear only weakly aligned with existing training and apprenticeships, evidenced by increased separations among both non-specialized and specialized workers. Moreover, firms create new positions for both worker types, suggesting within-firm reskilling of newcomers. This pattern indicates heterogeneity in non-specialized workers' ability to adapt to the new technology.