Research

WORKING PAPERS

Wired For Change? Clean Technology Adoption and Labor Market Transitions, Job Market Paper.

I investigate the effect of clean technology adoption on labor market outcomes. I leverage a demand-side heat pump subsidy shock in France that triggered supply-side adoption by heating firms, creating a natural experiment for studying worker adjustment. Using matched employer-employee data, I find establishment-level adoption increases both job creation and separations, indicating within-firm labor reallocation. Workers experience an average +10% rise in hours worked and +12% rise in earnings, challenging fears of severe adaptation costs. Decomposing by worker type, I find that stayers drive the results, with 20% higher hours and earnings. Both leavers and newcomers face initial losses; however, within one year, leavers are overcompensated and newcomers recover to baseline. Subsidy-driven technology adoption therefore results in low transition costs, avoiding mass displacement and directly updating workers' skills. 

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.

The Effect of Energy Efficiency Obligations (EEOs) on Residential Energy Use: Empirical Evidence from France,  with Matthieu Glachant. Working Paper.

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 59%. 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 €135/ t. CO2 eq., it is consistent with large unpriced comfort gains associated with energy renovation that standard CBA do not capture.