They Took Our Jobs! The Energy Transition and its Employment Consequences

Abstrakt

This study contributes to the existing literature on the potential direct employment effects as a result of the transition from non-renewable energy to renewable energy technologies. Contrary to most existing literature, this study takes a back-looking evaluative approach of understanding the nexus between employment and renewable energy implementation. We utilise the United Kingdom as a case study for the years 1998-2018 by applying an autoregressive distributed lag modelling framework to account for the dynamic nature of the transition, and any persistence in employment. Our findings indicate a positive and statistically significant coefficient of 0.055 for our independent variable of interest. This translates to a contemporaneous 0.055% increase in energy sector employment from a 1% positive shock to the share of renewable energy production. We also found our results to be robust after conducting subsample estimations and when substituting labour for employment in our estimation model.