Grants and Contracts Details
Description
What labor market frictions prevent workers and communities from smoothly adjusting to
local employment shocks? To what extent do investments in human capital address
existing frictions? The large-scale transition away from fossil fuels imposes acute
challenges for the workers employed in and communities built around carbon-intensive
industries. Workers in legacy energy sectors (i.e., fossil fuels) tend to possess relatively low
levels of educational attainment, and fossil fuels are spatially concentrated in distressed
regions offering few alternative, high-paying employment opportunities, such that the
energy transition threatens to exacerbate inequality along educational and regional
dimensions. In a frictionless market, displaced workers could simply transition from one
industry or labor market to another without signi?cant, long-run earnings losses or
unemployment spells (Walker, 2013). However, workers in legacy energy sectors suffer
large earnings and employment losses (Colmer et al., 2023a), and reallocation to other
industries and other labor markets is quite rare (Curtis et al., 2023; Colmer et al., 2023b),
suggesting that both skill and spatial mismatch may play important roles in preventing a
smooth adjustment to the energy transition. The extent to which existing frictions can be
addressed will likely have substantial implications for inclusive economic growth going
forward.
Status | Active |
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Effective start/end date | 9/1/24 → 8/31/25 |
Funding
- Washington Center for Equitable Growth Incorporated: $15,000.00
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