On November 25, 2024, Elisabeth Isaksen co-hosted the Early-Career Workshop in Empirical Environmental Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. The workshop provided a platform for early-career economists to present research, receive feedback, and foster networking and collaboration.
Isaksen presented preliminary results from an AdJUST-funded paper on the worker-level impacts of a green transition. The study examines the employment and earnings effects of a contraction in Norway’s fossil fuel industry, leveraging the 2014 oil price shock as a natural experiment. Using matched employer-employee data and quasi-experimental methods, the study finds substantial earnings declines for oil workers transitioning out of oil, particularly those with lower educational attainment.
While the study identifies limited reallocation of oil workers to green jobs, it finds that those who transitioned to green sectors represented a larger share of the destination workforce than those who moved to non-green, non-brown sectors. Workers entering green jobs experienced greater earnings losses than those transitioning to brown jobs; however, their losses were smaller than those of workers moving to other sectors. Further analysis of earnings differentials suggests that these disparities are primarily driven by lower establishment wage premiums rather than differences in skill distance or worker sorting.
